Creating Communities of Support for Staff and Students

As a teacher, I know how important it is to build the foundations of community in my classes. The time that I spend creating strong connections in my classroom is essential to weathering the storms that inevitably come our way during the year, whether it’s a conflict between students that threatens our learning community or a global crisis we’re trying to make sense of together.

To lay this type of foundation in my classroom, my favorite types of structures are those that help build relationships proactively and can also flex when times are hard. A check-in circle, for example, is a deceptively simple version of this. In my classes, I use a rose and thorn check-in circle, in which everyone has a chance to share the highlights and lowlights of their day so far.

These check-ins are often just about how well we slept or what we ate for breakfast, but once there is trust in the circle, roses and thorns can also be a place to talk about our reaction to current events, school culture, or changes in our lives. The routine and rhythm of the circle help build connection and can also become a container for big feelings and complex topics. One of the biggest benefits of this structure is that it carves out time to be together as a community every class session.

When a structure like this is in place, I’m more prepared for the unexpected. The day after a local tragedy, I don’t need to scramble to create time and a structure on my agenda to allow students to process and ask questions, because the time, space, and norms are already in place. I can’t know the details and complexity of how I will approach each situation ahead of time, but I can trust that space exists in which to do the work. My students and I can still experience routine in the face of disruption, and in that predictability, we can be vulnerable together.

These structures with students are important. We also need structures for the adults in school that build community proactively and that can hold the weight of hard times. Change often catches teachers off guard, or schools find themselves unprepared to slow down and have the conversations needed to handle the change process. When we build structures that expect change and crisis to happen, we build community resilience to get through change and crisis together.

Morning meetings

At the therapeutic school where I taught, the staff had a ten-minute morning meeting every single day before students arrived. I’m not referring to the structure of “morning meeting” used by many elementary teachers to start their day with students, but rather a brief huddle of teachers and staff before the day begins.

Morning meetings worked best in conjunction with other times set aside for professional learning and coordination. The intent of the morning meetings wasn’t to replace those other types of collaboration but instead to be the anchor of each day. Most days, the morning meeting was just announcements and greeting other teachers. We’d wander in with our coffee or a stack of papers and a stapler. We briefly checked in around the circle, shared announcements about who was absent or whose afternoon pick-up would be different that day, and then adjourned. Five minutes, done.

On other days, the morning meeting was a container for an emergent concern in our school, community, or world. We used morning meetings to process, strategize, and make sure we all felt ready for the day. Sometimes, a particular school social worker or administrator would briefly share a plan: “Student X had a rough night last night, here are the basics of what happened and here’s what they need today.” Other times, it was a more loose check-in: “Did everyone see the news last night? Who needs help with how to respond when students bring it up?”

Morning meetings can help us to be consistent and “on the same team” as a staff. I remember one morning, a social worker shared that a student’s father, with whom he had a complicated relationship, had died over the weekend. It was unexpected, an emotional announcement that threw many of us off-balance.

Guided by our school director and the student’s social worker, we took a moment together to remind ourselves that, when supporting others who are grieving, we need to set aside our own personal feelings about grief or family and simply be there for the person. We discussed how overwhelming it might be for every single teacher on the student’s schedule that day to initiate an intense emotional check-in with him. The social worker helped us think about ways we could acknowledge the loss and ask the student what he needed while not being invasive or projecting our own feelings about grief onto him. Our supervisor and the student’s social worker both offered to check in with any one of us teachers who were feeling upset or overwhelmed and also encouraged us to reach out throughout the day for ourselves or for the grieving student.

The end result was that the student arrived to school to be welcomed by a team of calm, grounded, consistent educators who were ready to support him. While we couldn’t have anticipated the crisis of that day, the structure of the morning meeting helped us to show up as our best selves for our students.

Learning communities

One of the most powerful ways to be resilient to change is to build community and relationships. In schools, it’s always been my belief that our best collegial relationships are built when we have time to do meaningful work together. My vision for equity, justice, and healing in schools includes fewer hierarchies, more collaboration, and more acknowledgment of collective wisdom.

Well-facilitated learning communities can help to nurture, practice, and model these conditions as we journey toward change. There are multiple structures, variations, and names for a learning community like this: Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), professional learning groups (Great Schools Partnership, n.d.), Critical Friends Groups (National School Reform Faculty, 2022), and communities of practice. At the therapeutic school where I worked, we called it group supervision (“group supe” for short).

What all of these variations have in common are skilled facilitators, protocols to guide engagement, and a shared commitment to improving our professional work in a community setting. Learning communities allow us to regularly engage in making meaning, deep learning, and integrating that meaning and learning into our practice. To use these as a structure that supports equity-centered trauma-informed school change, these learning groups should specifically be grounded in a shared commitment to working toward equity, justice, and healing.

When professional learning communities are built into the structure of school, they provide a container for consistently nourishing our understanding, creating space to hold one another accountable to change, and opportunities to learn from what Tricia Hersey (2022) calls “paper mentors,” or scholars, thought leaders, and others who we may never meet but who can guide us with their writings. 

As they engage in this learning together, they can build stronger relationships which allow them to give authentic feedback to one another and turn to each other in times of crisis. And because their learning community time is built in as a consistent structure, they can continue to grow even if they accomplish a particular “goal.” The process of the learning community extends beyond any particular project they take on as a group.

Excerpt from Becoming an Everyday Changemaker by Alex Shevrin Venet. © 2024 Routledge/Taylor & Francis Inc. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.