Filter by resource category:
Planning Tool for Family Engagement (Student Engagement and Attendance Center)
This tool is designed by Westat Insight (formerly Insight Policy Research) and American Institutes for Research to help state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and other educators work as a team to move toward practices with high authenticity for family engagement—practices that leverage relationships with families and seek to engage meaningfully with them. By using a continuous improvement process, teams at local, district, and state levels will collaboratively assess current family engagement practices, identify gaps, determine improvement practices that align with the components of authentic engagement, and prioritize practices to implement. Teams will then create an actionable…
Off to a Strong Start: The GRAD Partnership Year 1 Results
Year one of the GRAD Partnership’s implementation of student success systems, the next generation of early warning/on-track systems, occurred in the year following what many teachers and school leaders called the most challenging year of their career. Data from the first cohort of the GRAD Partnership schools indicates that student success systems were up to the challenge: Schools working with the GRAD Partnership to implement student success systems saw fewer course failures and reductions in chronic absenteeism. Read the research brief to learn more about the real, tangible, and meaningful ways student success system implementation benefitted students across the…
Creating Student Support Systems for Post-Pandemic Times: Insights from the Field
To pool the collective wisdom of front-line educators, the GRAD Partnership organized a regional gathering of student support personnel from over two dozen districts across the east coast. This brief shares the key insights from that convening, including key considerations for success.
The Importance of Student Sense of Belonging (IES)
Two-page infographic from IES’s Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest shares five promising strategies for teachers interested in nurturing relationships to support students’ sense of belonging.
Now is the Moment to Lean into Student Agency (The Christensen Institute)
The Christensen Institute shares how supporting student agency emerged during the pandemic as a key strategy for nurture students’ abilities in the face of uncertainty. This 2020 blog post shares three key benefits of fostering agency: engagement and learning, social and emotional well-being, and school operations; and offers practical steps for building toward each in your school.
Why is School Connectedness So Important?
This short post from 2018 summarizes what the authors found in their systematic research review on school connectedness, which aimed to define school connectedness and identify the relationship of four factors (attending, belonging, engaging, and flow) to connectedness. The blog post clearly lays out what looks connectedness looks like, and offers guidance for schools to encourage it, and the literature review takes a deeper, more theoretical approach towards the development of a model of school connectedness.
Structures for Belonging: A Synthesis of Research on Belonging-Supportive Learning Environments (SERN)
Student Experience Research Network reviews research on structural factors related to belonging in access to learning environments; relationships with educators, peers, and families; instructional resources and pedagogy; and system-level policies and practices.
The Belonging Barometer (Over Zero and the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council)
This robust 2023 report reviews the concept of belonging, centering its importance for key stakeholders, leaders, and philanthropists in the US today who care about health, democracy, and intergroup relations. The report introduces the Belonging Barometer, a way of measuring belonging that is robust, accessible, and readily deployable in the service of efforts to advance the common good. The Belonging Barometer was used in a nationally representative survey in late 2021 to assess the state of belonging in five life settings: family, friends, workplace, local community, and the nation. The report concludes with considerations for designing interventions that increase…
Brené Brown on Empathy (video)
Building trusted relationships within any group, including among those in co-deigning sessions, is critical. This animated short from RSA is narrated by Brené Brown, and offers important insights into how to authentically relate to others.
School Connectedness Helps Students Thrive (CDC.gov)
The CDC shares why connectedness is important and the benefits of promoting connectedness in our schools. The website includes specific actions schools can take to build connectedness, the effects of school connectedness, and additional resources to decrease risky behaviors through connectedness, including from the CDC’s What Works in Schools. See also the March 2009 CDC report, School connectedness: Strategies for increasing protective factors among youth, which includes detailed examples of six strategies to promote school connectedness: