A supportive and equitable classroom environment serves as a platform for all academic, social, and emotional learning. At the core of a supportive classroom is a caring, engaging teacher who fosters relationships and trust, building a sense of belonging and emotional safety among students.
In a supportive and equitable learning environment, each student experiences:
Resulting in key outcomes:
(Adapted from the BELE Framework, p. 5)
SEL teams can support teachers by offering specific practices, structures, skill-building opportunities, and space to discuss efforts with colleagues as they work to build a supportive classroom environment. If your school is using an evidence-based SEL program, review it to determine whether it includes guidance or activities to build on for strengthening classroom relationships and community. Talk with teachers to learn about the strategies they are already using successfully.
Then, review the rubric or the questions below to identify areas for growth:
Do teachers use inclusive, relationship-centered, and culturally responsive practices?
Are teachers using developmentally appropriate strategies to strengthen classroom community?
Do classroom practices and environments support, honor, and acknowledge cultural assets, contributions, and needs of all students?
Are shared agreements collaboratively developed, consistently modeled by adults and students, and woven into daily routines and practices?
Based on your responses, you can use the guidance and resources in this section to collaborate with teachers to adopt new practices, structures, and relationship strategies to supplement the work they already do to create a supportive classroom environment.
This tool provides readings, individual and group reflection questions, and activities for small groups to discuss and support each other to implement practices that strengthen learning environments. Use this as a source to strengthen staff collaboration, relationships, knowledge, and skills over the course of the school year.
Consistent and clear routines in classrooms create a sense of predictability and safety, reduce stress, and facilitate learning for all students (Darling-Hammond and Cook-Harvey, 2018), including those who have experienced trauma, are neurodiverse, or struggle behaviorally. When these routines are also designed to progressively strengthen students’ skills in discussion, reflection, collaboration, reflection, and leadership, they can be a pathway toward greater engagement and agency as well as social, emotional, and academic growth.
The first days and weeks of the school year are the most common time for establishing routines, but teachers can model reflection and collaboration with students any time by revisiting routines that aren’t working as intended or designing new practices together to address a need. The tool below can support teachers through a process of determining moments when routines can be useful and elevating student voice in shaping practices to the greatest extent possible.
Clear and consistent routines and procedures make for more organized and predictable classroom environments, which can help students as they self-regulate, express themselves, manage challenges and stressors, collaborate with others, and focus on learning. As students begin to take ownership over these practices, they can also increase their sense of agency, leadership, and belonging.
Including students in the process of developing or refining a classroom routine is an opportunity for them to practice social and emotional skills, and it also helps to ensure students experience the practice as valuable and developmentally appropriate.
In addition to creating psychological safety, routine classroom practices that promote social interaction and belonging lay the groundwork for academic engagement and growth. A student’s sense of belonging in their classroom community leads to a more positive connection with school as well as stronger self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation (Jagers et al., 2021; Farrington et al., 2012). When students feel accepted and respected in their classroom, they feel safe taking the intellectual risks required to learn. Learning is a social activity, and students are better able to make meaning of what they are learning in community (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1998).
To strengthen the classroom community, teachers across all developmental levels have embraced the structure of a circle discussion. This discussion format is inspired by circle practices of Indigenous Nations across many cultures. Teachers facilitating circles should be mindful and respectful of these origins, recognizing the circle as a way of being rooted in relationships and interconnection, rather than purely an instructional strategy or technique (Living Justice Press, 2024).
In a circle discussion, participants sit in a circle and each person has a turn to respond to a question or prompt, one at a time and without interruptions or back-and-forth discussion, as a talking piece is passed around the circle. The purpose of a circle discussion is to share feelings, thoughts, and stories and to connect to others. The structure of a circle removes hierarchy, makes room for all voices, and encourages everyone to feel they can be open and honest. The regular use of circle discussions strengthens trust and empathy, which are key to building relationships.
This tool includes planning considerations, a set-up checklist, a recommended circle process and planning template, and four sample circle scripts for facilitating community-building circles (sample scripts are intended for middle and high school classrooms).
Collaboratively creating class agreements and goals is a powerful strategy for developing a sense of community. These statements reflect students’ shared understanding of how they wish to be treated and will treat one another, and how they can support each other to achieve meaningful goals. Teachers can display agreements and goals prominently and refer back to them regularly to reinforce SEL and help create a shared sense of purpose and ideals.
For sustainable, motivating agreements and goals:
Sample collaborative class activities to establish agreement about how members of the community will treat one another and act cooperatively in order to achieve shared goals.
Shared Agreements Are for Staff, Too
At a Chicago high school, students, staff, and researchers worked together in a committee to study their experiences and practices with restorative justice. One critical relationship development activity the cross-generation team engaged in was the development of acuerdos, which were the ground rules that outlined how team members would collaborate with one another. Gema Gaete, a counselor at the school, indicated that it was common for students to “check” staff and students during meetings if they were not staying committed to the acuerdos. Students’ ability to speak honestly to school staff on the committee signaled the trust students felt with the group’s members, especially with the adults.
Excerpted from Integrated Learning, Integrated Lives: Highlighting Opportunities for Transformative SEL Within Academic Instruction (Schwartz et al., 2023).
Students thrive when teachers know them well and affirm their individual and diverse identities (Steele and Cohn-Vargas, 2013), showing that they genuinely care for and respect each student, and that they believe each students’ knowledge, life experiences, and culture are an asset to the classroom community.
Teachers support identity-affirming classrooms when they:
The resources below are a starting point to explore concrete strategies for affirming students’ identities:
This activity is an opportunity for students to explore their identity as learners and how past experiences have shaped their sense of themselves in the classroom. Reading these autobiographies will be an important learning experience for their teachers as well.
Students feel valued and supported in school when their teachers (and other school staff) are responsive to their perspectives and needs. Responsiveness is grounded in trusting relationships and an understanding of how classroom life is experienced by students (SoLD Alliance, 2020; Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013; Allensworth et al., 2018). This requires that teachers and school leaders ask students about their experience and their ideas for improvement, then transparently make changes as a result. This process benefits learning while also strengthening relationships and showing students they are valued as partners in building a stronger community of learners.
Ask Students About Their Classroom Experience
The Elevate survey offers a set of questions for learning from students about how they are experiencing six essential learning conditions that are associated with engagement and success:
Learn more about the survey items here.
This two-part teacher reflection protocol can help to process results, identify ways to change classroom practices in response to students’ feedback, and communicate with students about results and next steps.
One teacher who used the Elevate survey with his middle school social studies classes was shocked to find that many of his students felt his assigned work was not meaningful and didn’t affirm their cultural identities. Deeply committed to examining the data and growing, the teacher was willing to be vulnerable and reflect on the data to make changes. He returned to the classroom with a two-pronged plan to learn more about his students’ perspectives. First, he held individual conferences with his students to learn what meaningful work looked like for them. Second, he shared the survey data with his class and used a discussion protocol to generate ideas for changes to the curriculum. Based on what he learned, the teacher not only adjusted his curriculum and his assignments, but also the way he interacted with his students
This example first appeared in From Feedback to Action: Using Student Experience Data to Transform Learning Environments (Nwafor, 2023)
Surveys are a common way of learning from students, but when working with younger students or any students who are already taking too many surveys, these resources provide alternatives:
A variety of methods, sample feedback topics, and examples of how a teacher can learn from students through observation, discussion, or a multiple-choice question.
A structure and sample questions for one-on-one chats to open dialogue with students and learn more about how they are experiencing school.
The Search Institute also provides many free resources aligned with their Developmental Relationships Framework, including:
For more guidance and resources for collaborating with students for school improvement, see Focus Area 2: Strengthen Adult SEL > Connect and Collaborate With Students.
When classrooms foster mutually trusting relationships and a strong sense of community, belonging, and safety, students are less likely to engage in disruptive behaviors (Durlak et al., 2011; Mahoney et al., 2018; Balfanz et al., 2024). While many of the practices described above proactively contribute to a balanced disciplinary approach by reducing incidents of misbehavior, this final section is focused on ways teachers can respond to challenging student behavior in a way that is respectful of students’ experience, is responsive to needs, and strengthens relationships and skills.
As stated in Building Equitable Environments (BELE) Framework, “the goals of discipline policies and practices are to support student learning and development and to repair community rather than to punish or exclude students” (p. 16). SEL teams may, as part of their schoolwide SEL implementation plan, work to align schoolwide discipline policies with SEL goals, and at the classroom level they may arrange for professional learning, space for teacher discussion and collaborative problem-solving, or coaching in the use of student-centered discipline practices.
Student-centered discipline prioritizes student learning and ownership of their behavior, engaging them as decision-makers and problem-solvers. This process:
In contrast, classroom discipline practices that focus on punishment can undermine schoolwide SEL initiatives and disengage students from their classroom communities (Toldson, McGee & Lemmons, 2013; Kupchik & Catlaw, 2014).
Specific disciplinary practices that are student-centered include:
Adapted from “Student-Centered Discipline” in AIR’s Social and Emotional Learning Coaching Toolkit
Some SEL programs include guidance and training for implementing a student-centered approach to discipline. The program library in the CASEL Program Guide can be filtered to find programs by student outcome, types of training offered, program approach, and more, and can be useful for finding an evidence-based SEL program that is best suited for your school community’s goals.
Many schools have adopted a restorative practice model as an SEL-aligned approach to discipline and more broadly as an approach to strengthening relationships within a community. Visit the International Institute for Restorative Practices site for more information, or download the tool below that we developed with that organization describing how restorative practices and SEL are aligned.
See how restorative practices mutually support and reinforce SEL competencies, examples of restorative practices and language, and strategies for implementing both SEL and restorative practices in a cohesive way.
This professional learning resource from a collaborating organization in Chicago, the New Root Learning Institute, includes a reflection exercise to understand the difference between a punitive and a restorative mindset and an activity to re-frame punitive statements toward students with restorative language and mindsets.
Centering students also means that specific practices must be developmentally appropriate— that is, they allow for a level of responsibility and agency that is appropriate given students’ age and developmental assets. Consider whether current practices match students’ level of understanding and skill, but also that they are appropriate responses to the most common types of behavioral challenges in the setting.
Consider these similar approaches to resolving interpersonal conflict, adjusted for developmental context:
Consider these similar approaches to resolving interpersonal conflict, adjusted for developmental context:
Related resources:
More video examples of student-centered discipline: