Creating School Culture That Nurtures Young People

A nurturing school culture that prioritizes well-being along with learning is essential for keeping children in school and ending pushout — a critical step in dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Building and sustaining relationships in nurturing ways can help to create the sense of safety and support young people need for learning. The effectiveness of these practices increases when combined with strong family, school and community partnerships.

This resource builds on an understanding of holistic child development and offers practical strategies for fostering family-school-community partnerships and being intentional about creating healthy and supportive classroom relationships.

What Do We Mean by School Culture and Climate?

School culture refers to a school’s physical and social environment and its community values as expressed through curricula, policies and practice. These values influence the decisions and ways things are done at the school.

School climate refers to how students and adults experience the school’s environment and the extent to which it feels welcoming and inclusive for all students, especially students from historically marginalized groups (e.g., Black and Indigenous children, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ youth, immigrant students and more).

Considering a holistic — or “whole-child” — development approach can help to create a more supportive school culture. In the article “Becoming a Village,” educator and Children’s Defense Fund program manager Joy Masha points out five components to holistic child development:

Physical development encompasses growth, honing motor skills and coordination, and engaging in activities that contribute to overall physical health and well-being.
Intellectual development pertains to cognitive advancement, encompassing thinking, reasoning, problem-solving and the acquisition of new knowledge.
Social development fosters interactions with others, nurturing social skills, empathy and cooperation. This facilitates the establishment of positive relationships within family, peer groups and the broader community.
Emotional development entails nurturing the ability to understand and regulate emotions, fostering independence, resilience and the cultivation of healthy relationships.
Spiritual development involves the formulation of personal values, moral principles and identity. It entails supporting the development of children’s personality, beliefs and sense of purpose from an early age.

School culture that incorporates a whole-child approach to development understands that children thrive in learning environments that support their diverse abilities and needs.

Positive school culture includes a safe and affirming environment where students feel they belong, supportive relationships among staff and students, and equitable supports for all students to meet high expectations, learn and thrive.

Building Family-School-Community Partnerships

The school is part of the community and only one aspect of a child’s life and experiences. To fully support the well-being and learning of all children, schools must work collaboratively with families and communities. Creating a loving and nurturing school environment is a collective responsibility for families, educators and communities. Collaboration is essential.

In “Becoming a Village,” Masha provides examples of a model from the Children’s Defense Fund for family-school-community partnerships. To foster collaboration, she offers the following recommendations that involve “embracing the contributions of families and leveraging the diverse strengths of all stakeholders.”

Encourage parental and caregiver involvement. Shift thinking from a limited idea of what a good parent looks, sounds and thinks like — which often is rooted in white Eurocentric ideologies — to creating an inclusive environment, ready to receive what families have to offer and to support families in achieving shared goals.
Foster open communication channels among parents and caregivers, educators and school administrators, and recognize families as valuable sources of insight, expertise and support.
Build trust and mutual respect among stakeholders. Say what you mean and mean what you say. At the beginning of the relationship, set clear expectations and keep communication consistent. Offer continuous shared learning and growth to address challenges head-on using restorative practices.
Leverage technology for communication and engagement. Technology is advancing every day in providing users with tools for connection, information, entertainment, access and more.
Co-develop and implement joint initiatives and programs with active involvement from families, who contribute valuable resources and support to enhance partnerships.
Encourage inclusive decision-making that honors the perspectives and contributions of all stakeholders.
Equitably provide (and invite) family resources and support to help all stakeholders realize their power to enrich the community’s collaborative efforts.
Promote cultural sensitivity and diversity awareness. Identify and develop a praxis that reflects and affirms the values and worldviews of Black and other people of color as well as other historically marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ families and people with disabilities.

Building collaborations requires commitment and work toward equitable and supportive relationships. In the article “Loving and Nurturing Young People,” education professor and author Shamari Reid points out: “Importantly, collaborations for projects need to start in the planning or ideation stage. Collective endeavors must move beyond educators and schools planning and then inviting families to help execute. True collaboration involves everyone from the beginning.”
Reid recommends the following questions to reflect on in developing collaboration:

What is the best way to communicate with other educators and family members in a young person’s life?
What is an ideal time to meet with other educators and family members in a young person’s life to plan activities? This may not be during the school day, as many family members work during school hours.
What do I know about young people’s physical, emotional and spiritual needs? How might I find out what other educators and family members know about young people’s needs?
What resources do I have to contribute to activities and initiatives focused on young people’s well-being? What resources do other educators and family members have for this same aim?
How are we making sure that both educators and family members are sharing the responsibility for nurturing young people’s well-being?

Riley Drake, an assistant professor of school counseling, offers an example of school-community partnership in the article “Solidarity as Social and Emotional Safety.” Through the experiences of a teacher’s collaboration with community organizers, Drake emphasizes: “By partnering with justice-centered community organizers to build students’ solidarity, educators can co-plan lessons and units, center community knowledge and ways of being and offer students opportunities to learn from and build collective capacity with community sustenance experts.”

In thinking about family-school-community partnerships, consider Shamari Reid’s words of encouragement: “All young people are worthy and deserving of love — the kind of love that moves us to nurture their physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. And we are better together and more effective when we work together rather than in isolation.”

Being Intentional About Relationships

Building and sustaining relationships in nurturing ways can help to create the sense of safety and support young people need for learning. Being intentional about relationship-building is, therefore, essential in schools and community learning spaces. Taking time to learn, ask questions and get to know young people, and for them to get to know their peers, can help everyone feel connected.

The following reminders, adapted from the article “Time Spent Building Community Is Never Time Wasted” by Hoyt Phillips, can help keep relationship-building in focus.

Relationship-building is planned and intentional. Just thinking children will come together and bond does not make it happen; relationship-building takes thoughtful planning.
Relationship-building is consistent and sustained. Relationships that help young people navigate challenges need time. Planning ongoing avenues of engagement will help support stronger relationships.
Relationship-building is fun and celebratory. Young people will be more engaged if the time is enjoyable and does not feel like a chore. Also, celebrating milestones is important.
Relationship-building starts small and builds. Brief, consistent types of engagements can go a long way. A simple and fun opening question — one that doesn’t require too much vulnerability — to start off meetings can lead to interesting insights. Once this structure is in place, asking children as they are comfortable to be more vulnerable can happen over time.
Relationship-building is transparent. The group clearly knows the purpose and how it is part of and not separate from their work. Transparency — letting young people know why they are doing something — can build stronger relationships, as can providing space for feedback.
Relationship-building is a group effort. It’s more effective and fun when young people have input into planning and sustaining relationship-building efforts.

Identity and Community

Understanding who is in the room with you can help shape intentional relationship-building with young people and their families.

The following reflection and recommendations are adapted from the Learning for Justice PD Café column “Who’s in Your Classroom?”

1. Begin with yourself.

Write down six words or phrases that define your identity. Now select the one you consider least essential to who you are and take it off the list. Continue to remove “less essential” aspects of your identity one at a time until only one is left.

How did you choose the original words or phrases for your list? How did you decide which to eliminate first? How did the process make you feel? Does the remaining word or phrase represent all of who you are? Follow up your reflection by trying this activity with colleagues.

2. Think about your students.

Ask yourself, “How many children in my school community…”

Speak a language other than English at home?
Were born outside the United States or have parents who were?
Live in intergenerational households?
Are members of families who actively practice a religion?
Live with caregivers other than their parents?
Live with single parent or same-sex parents?
Identify as LGBTQ+?
Live at or below the poverty line?
Are neurodiverse?
Have physical, developmental or cognitive disabilities?
Belong to a racial or ethnic community that has been historically marginalized (e.g., Black, Indigenous, Asian American, etc.)?

Some of this information may be available via school records or data-gathering systems. Start there. Then use a strategy like a Community Action Board (see below) to become more familiar with other aspects of your students’ identities and the issues that matter to them.

3. Create a Community Action Board.

Encourage students to post articles, illustrations, comics, poems or quotations that capture what’s happening in their homes and neighborhoods.

Choosing from the issues that emerge on the Community Action Board, adopt an issue facing the community. Have students work with local allies or advocates to generate ideas for how to address the issue. Invite community members to the class or attend a community gathering and present the class findings along with a suggested course of action.

Invite students to reflect on the experience, by themselves and in groups. Talking about community issues can bring students together despite gaps and differences. Finally, reflect on the experience yourself. What did the Community Action Board teach you about your students’ identities?

4. Audit the learning space.

Take a look around and ask yourself, “Whose identities and voices do I invite into my classroom?” Record your thoughts in a reflection journal.

Complete a classroom and curriculum audit to review the diversity represented in your classroom decor and curricular materials. Map out your classroom to list examples and where they are found. How do they compare to what you wrote in your journal? How do they compare to the diversity that you know exists among your students?

5. Put it all together.

What is identity? How is identity developed? How does identity affect our relationships? Now that you know more about the children in your classroom, you can work on intentional ways to build and sustain relationships and community that can help support them.

Relationship-Building Practices

Educator Rebecca Coven shared the following classroom practices for building caring, intentional and equitable classroom communities:

1. Start the school year by nurturing a sense of belonging in every student.

Show you care with the first assignment. An early assignment in any classroom should involve getting to know each other: collages for writing journals, math graphs of home life, favorite items, icebreakers, photos, decorating the classroom with personal drawings, etc.
One powerful way to establish a culture of connection and belonging is for teachers to clearly articulate their core principles to students and then hold themselves accountable for modeling those principles in all learning spaces.

Examples of Core Principles:

“I care about you, and you have value.” By articulating this principle, a teacher can strive to practice unconditional positive regard for students. This tells young people that they do not have to do anything to prove their value; you care about them no matter what. Their value is not tied to their academic performance.
“This is our classroom; we are learning together.” This principle creates a democratic classroom space in which traditional power roles are redistributed. To achieve this, we need to examine, question and rethink the traditional roles of teachers and students. One favorite activity for the beginning of learning together is rethinking the role of the teacher and the student. Students brainstorm individually, then in groups, the roles and responsibilities of the teacher and the students. The class then makes a list of each, side by side, on the board and then looks for similarities and differences. Students often notice that many of the roles and responsibilities of the teacher and the students overlap. In this way, students begin to take ownership over the learning environment.

2. Co-develop community ethos, or culture, with students.

How do we want to be together? What do we need from one another? These questions should be considered with students to encourage thinking intentionally about what sort of learning environment we want to create so that everyone’s needs are being met. Together, develop shared guiding beliefs that will characterize your learning community and apply beyond the classroom.

First, reflect on and define what trust and respect mean, as trust and respect are the foundation of all relationships. Create space for each student to share what makes them feel trusted and respected, by peers and by teachers. From there, students should reflect on something they need to be a successful learner and how they would like their classmates and the teacher to help meet their need. The community guiding beliefs should hang on the wall all year to hold teacher and students accountable, and it should be a living document for reflection and to set goals for growth.

3. Hold circles to build relationships and community.

The quality and number of relationships and connections young people have can help them develop resiliency in the face of trauma. As such, helping students build relationships by connecting with one another and with their community is essential.

Weekly circles can help build and sustain relationships and community. At the beginning of the year, the teacher might lead most circles, but as the school year progresses, slowly transition circle-keeping to students. Importantly, circles to build relationships and community are different from problem-solving and issue-focused circles; they are meant to reaffirm relationships. Circles may include check-in circles, talking circles, and community-building circles. You may also incorporate into circles the instruction and practice of social emotional skills, such as empathetic listening, managing stress and anxiety, and creating safety plans.

4. Redistribute power in the classroom.

Young people often experience school as a place of powerlessness. The traditional view is for educators to hold power in the classroom and to use that power to “direct” student behavior. This can of course lead to student resistance.

Since trauma takes power from a person, a trauma-informed approach requires educators to think critically about how not to reproduce the dynamic of trauma in the classroom. Instead, help students realize their power through shared decision-making and authentic choice. Student autonomy helps to redistribute power in the classroom. For example, always practice active consent when reading student work (particularly if they have written something personal) and sharing student work.

Consulting with young people when making decisions is not the same as creating an environment where young people and adults are equally recognized for their value and wisdom. Practices that help create space for cooperative decision-making include holding regular student-led town halls in the classroom for students to share and implement ideas for the class, explicitly teaching organizing skills and strategies to help young people develop and enact action plans, and forming social justice clubs.

As humans, we all need to be seen and heard; we need to see one another’s inherent worth and our inherent humanity.

5. Listen.

What are your students saying — and what are they not saying? From the intricately detailed stories of some students to the quiet silence of others, listening to the messages and reading between the lines will tell you a lot about them.

6. Interact with students outside the classroom.

Sharing nonacademic experiences can help you and your students see one another as whole people. Eat lunch together. Take them on a trip. Go to their sporting or extracurricular events. Attend community events in their neighborhoods.

7. Know your allies and involve them.

Invite families into the classroom and ask for their help, support and suggestions. Share regular updates about lessons and, with parent permission, examples of student work through a newsletter or parent-teacher communication app.

8. Collaborate to support students.

If your school offers support services or if a similar collaborative team exists, work with them to create and implement plans that will help students succeed.

9. Model humility and fallibility.

We are all human, and we are all fallible. There are times when we will react to students in ways we wish we hadn’t. It’s OK to tell students that you’ve made a mistake and that you will try to do better. This will help them to know that it’s OK for them to make mistakes as well.

The practice of consent and autonomy is critical for student relationships. All students will not have the same connection with a teacher, and no teacher can demand that relationship. However, we can provide consistent and intentional opportunities for connection and community, and teachers can help students build relationships with peers and with other staff with whom they might connect.

An important question for educators to ask themselves is, “How can I help my students strengthen the relationships that they have with other people?”

Resources

20 Face to Face Advisories

When properly facilitated, advisory period can be a time for the authentic relationship- and community-building that students need to feel safe and supported in their schools. Learning for Justice partnered with The Origins Program to present 20 Face to Face Advisories, activities selected from Face to Face Advisories: Bridging Cultural Gaps in Grades 5-9.

The meetings in 20 Face to Face Advisories expose students to diverse perspectives and guide them to understand those perspectives and to analyze ideas from a variety of cultures critically and honestly. This all happens through safe, engaging, guided peer-to-peer activities that build social emotional skills and connections across differences. The complete publication, with step-by-step guidance for the 20 advisories, is available as a free guide that you can download at learningforjustice.org.

Referenced Articles:

Joy Masha, “Becoming a Village.” Learning for Justice, Issue 6, Fall 2024
Shamari Reid, “Loving and Nurturing Young People.” Learning for Justice, Issue 6, Fall 2024
Riley Drake, “Solidarity as Social and Emotional Safety.” Learning for Justice online articles, Jan. 23, 2023
Hoyt Phillips, “Time Spent Building Community Is Never Time Wasted.” Learning for Justice, Issue 4, Spring 2023
“Who’s in Your Classroom?” Learning for Justice (Teaching Tolerance), Issue 50, Summer 2015

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Creating School Culture That Nurtures Young People

What Do We Mean by School Culture and Climate?

Building Family-School-Community Partnerships

Being Intentional About Relationships