Then another: “I like to play with my little brothers.”
And then: “A little-known fact about me is that I am missing half of my lung.”
Advisors exclusively for girls and for all genders also meet in other classrooms on campus; students choose which type they are assigned to. During these circles of trust, students cannot opt out of sharing, because this first period sets the tone for the day. Students will depend on each other to help them complete missing assignments at the end of the day, and teachers and administrators like Razavi want students to feel safe being vulnerable with each other.
Immediately after sharing time, each child tells the group what class assignments they need to complete. Your peers offer advice, encouragement, or simply recognition.
“That’s where growth happens,” said Razavi, a humanities teacher and assistant principal at the school. “Growth comes through risk. That’s where children feel part of a community and it’s an indicator that children have a sense of belonging.”
Experts agree that a sense of belonging (that is, students feeling accepted, respected, and supported at school) is essential. crucial for academic success. Perhaps this is even more true for boys, who are more likely than girls to have repeat kindergarten and lie down reading and writing skills and less likely graduate from high school.
But this security eludes many children who receive the message early in life They are not good students.
“Something happens over time, so that by the time they get to high school, kids don’t feel like they belong in academic environments,” said Ioakim Boutakidis, a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University, Fullerton, and a researcher at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group. “And that hurts academic belonging, the feeling that you’re good enough to succeed in these academic spaces.” (Rise Together, a fund established by American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves, is one of the Hechinger Report’s many donors.)
At Oakland Unity High School, teachers are trying to break that cycle through the relationship building program, which is designed to normalize male vulnerability and support boys to be themselves, rather than what they feel is expected of them. Just over 140 sixth, seventh and eighth grade students attend the school, almost all of them from East Oakland, one of the most ethnically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Bay Area.
The program, Ever Forward, was founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch, then a first-year teacher at nearby San Lorenzo, to embrace a philosophy of “radical positivity.” As of 2021, according to Branch, he has led more than 300 workshops, primarily in Northern California, and has reached more than 30,000 teachers and educators.
“I feel like this school is like my second home,” said Adrian Polanco, an eighth-grade student at Unity who wants to study business in college. “We always have someone we can look up to, who has our back, which I think is really good and really important for the school.”
No one claims that social-emotional support for children alone will help them do better academically, but experts say programming to boost belonging may be key to closing the academic gender gap.
Warmth and connection are very important to boys, even if they don’t always demonstrate these needs by responding to questions and expectations as girls often do, Boutakidis said. It may seem like kids don’t care what adults think of them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t crave connection.
This can make it difficult for some teachers to connect with boys in the classroom and even interpret boys’ behavior as so disconnected as to be antagonistic, said Matt Englar-Carlson, a professor of counseling and co-director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton. This may be particularly true with teenage boys.
“When you think that what’s happening is disrespectful in the classroom, the reality is it usually isn’t, because they’re not acting for you,” Englar-Carlson said. “They’re acting for their peers around them. He can ridicule you and save face in front of his friends and act like he doesn’t care.”
Once teachers start to realize what’s happening, they will be able to make adaptations to their teaching, he said, such as asking kids questions in a different way. Instead of calling a student out in front of the class, teachers can approach them as they walk around the classroom and speak to them quietly, at their level.
“So now it’s really a private conversation between the two of you,” he said, “and you don’t actually have to report the bad behavior.”
Ashanti Branch learned early on the challenges male students face. A wrestler and football player while attending East Oakland public schools, he now wears his hair in long braids and has an easy, warm smile and laugh. After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Branch worked as a civil engineer before moving into teaching.
As one of the few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School, about 20 miles south of Oakland, Branch soon discovered that male students were venting their anger and frustration at him.
“I saw young people who were brilliant, but the way they acted in front of the class was really difficult,” he said. “I told them, ‘Young man, do you want to fight with me because it looks good on your classmates? I’m not here to fight with you. I’m not your enemy. You’re a high school student. I’m an adult with a job. What are we arguing about? I want you to be successful.'”
He invited some male students to have lunch with him once a week and asked them how he could be a better teacher. What they told him was that their lives were too difficult for school to be a priority. Students described “outbursts” (sudden outbursts of anger and emotion) after dealing with one emotional “landmine” after another.
“When a kid gets pushed down the hallway, he ignores it, ignores it, and then all of a sudden he turns around and explodes,” Branch said, making an explosion gesture with both hands. “And then he gets into trouble, right?”
Branch recalled that as a teacher he was encouraged to leave his own problems “in the glove compartment” before coming to work.
“I tried to do that, but I realized it was very disingenuous,” he said. Instead, he was honest with his students about how they were doing. “I told them, ‘I had a tough weekend. A lot of drama happened in my life. Today is not a good day.'” He calls this approach “normalizing vulnerability,” an essential step for young men to be themselves as people and as students.
Branch turned weekly lunches with students into a club, the Always Forward Clubwhere young people could gather to process emotions. She spent a decade developing the program and expanding it to more schools, eventually leaving her job to develop the program and provide professional development to educators.
At the heart of the Ever Forward Club is a project-based tool Branch calls Masks, Emotions, and Math. During the workshops, Branch guides youth to explore the ways they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult emotions.
Since the club began in 2004, all participating students have graduated high school and 93 percent have transitioned to college, the military or a vocational school, Branch said. Expanded work to include professional development for educators, calling it the Million Mask Movement.
Tony Farrell, head of Stuart Hall High School — the children’s segment of a school in San Francisco affiliated with Sacred Heart Schools* — recalls an event Branch led at her school ten years ago. Two hundred male high school students sat in a large circle in the school gym, Farrell said, and Branch handed out pens and paper. He asked the students to write on one side of the paper how they appear to the world. On the other hand, he said, write down the things the world doesn’t know about them.
Then they crumpled the papers and threw them at each other.
“It was a snowball fight,” Farrell said. “We had a perfectly, wonderfully random pile of crumpled paper.”
Then each child took a ball of paper, smoothed it out, and, one at a time, read what another child had written.
Farrell recalled the children reading, “You wouldn’t know by looking at me that my parents are getting divorced” and “You wouldn’t know by looking at me that my grandmother is very sick.”
“Not that it’s a joke, but it was like an electric field,” he said. “It was really powerful.”
Two years ago, Branch led a Masks, emotions and mathematics event at Oakland Unity High School. Since then, teachers at the school have integrated elements of Branch’s work into routine practices, including how the school handles disciplinary issues. This is also where Razavi’s idea of offering counseling periods differentiated by sex came from.
Some children need a space where they can open up to other children, she said, without the social dynamics that can arise with all-gender groups.
“If you know that belonging is important and you know that there is a very obvious decline in the sense of belonging over time for children, then we have to work to make children feel like they belong,” she said. “And we have to work on that first.”
Eighth-grader Pierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after his old high school closed. He wants to go to university and study something related to health. He describes the support he receives from his teachers at school as “warm.”
“You can tell them things that you couldn’t tell other people,” he said, “and they just have this different energy that makes you feel comfortable.”
“I agree with that,” seventh-grader Jubran Sulaiman agreed. “We can all, what’s the word? Express ourselves.”
On Wednesdays, Hill and other students go to the school’s Learning Lab, where they get help completing any missed work. Chris Bibbens Williams is the teacher in charge of the Learning Lab. She said the Masks, Emotions and Math event Branch led at the school helped the otherwise shy students engage more deeply with their peers.
“There will be some kids who will be more confident speaking in front of everyone, but even the kids who weren’t confident, it just seemed like because the space was positive, it was an opportunity for them to say how they were feeling at that moment,” she said. “That’s something I love about this school: We really let the kids be themselves and build those deep relationships.”
When not in the Learning Lab, Williams can be found all over campus, playing basketball with students and hanging out with them in the cafeteria.
“When you build those relationships, kids come to you,” he said.
Recently, Williams approached an eighth-grade student who had not completed his language arts assignments. Were you not doing the work because it was too difficult or because you lacked confidence?
“I asked him to come and read the passage to me,” Williams said, “and I discovered that it was really just that he didn’t have confidence in his reading.”
With Williams sitting next to him, the student went through the passage and read words he was unfamiliar with. Since then, Williams has noticed a change in the boy’s confidence level.
“He’s trying harder,” he said, “and that’s all I can ask for.”
Contact editor Christina Samuels at (212) 678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org.
