Building a Sense of Belonging at the Secondary Level

This Course

This course is based on recommendations from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on how to build a sense of belonging in your school.

The first part of this course focuses on training mentors for your students. Instead of adding one more task to the education team's plate in the school, we request that you invite your district coordinator for professional development to attend and share how they can provide the training for the prospective mentors. This way, they will have the information for other schools. The National Mentoring Center has all the materials they will need.

The second part of this course deals with service-learning projects which may or may not be guided by mentors with the help of the classroom teachers.

The third part of this course focuses on student-led clubs, and this definitely will need mentors who have been trained to help guide the students in their clubs.

Finally, the fourth session of this course focuses on first building community staff to staff and then building a sense of belonging with the students with a quick professional development course on things that can be done at the classroom level to build a sense of belonging.

When all four of these quadrants are implemented, the students' sense of belonging to the school will improve.

There is a plethora of information to cover. We feel this would work best if approximately 1.5 to 2 hours are spent on each section during weekly faculty meetings or spread out of two professional development days at the beginning of the year.