Belonging Intersections: Friday

As an instructional coach, I get to see a ton of instructional design decision-making every day! The variety in my context means fresh opportunities every day to see ways for education to create belonging for all learners! The specifics of the consulting and coaching requests are always different, but belonging always seems the answer!

This week’s belonging opportunities? Social studies coaching, middle school science coaching, assessment literacy professional development, coteaching coaching, and trauma-informed PD.

One week, day-by-day:

Friday: All week I’ve tried to get to these recorded conference sessions from a statewide Trauma conference offered last weekend. As a trauma-certified practitioner for education (TCP-E) I am relentless in my studies. I’ve wanted to have the right slot to commit to one particular session: “ACEs and Race.”

The brief dip into the world of historical trauma, epigenetics, and implicit bias expands both the ACEs (adverse childhood effects) concept and the (cultural) expansion of resilience.

I tick off a list forming in my head: 1) bring this content to others, maybe in one of our Mental Wellness Team roundtables? 2) how do I examine my own implicit bias regarding resilience? and 3) where can I embed these expansions in upcoming work?

Belonging is everywhere; intersecting with all the best practices, big initiatives, and foundations of education. To create belonging is to be learner-centered — ALL learners! If you look back at the week with me, you see belonging everywhere: disrupting stereotypes, inviting student voice, promoting inquiry models, designing with high rigor expectations, humanizing personalized learning, creating belonging groups, and expanding our perspectives of diverse lived and living narratives!

Belonging is actually a signal of safety to our brains! No matter the task, the content, the work, the audience, ask how can I signal safety and authentic belonging in this thing I do?

Belonging opportunities are everywhere! It is our job to seek them and design them for instruction!