By the largest international measure we have, Japanese students report a strong sense of belonging at school, at or above the level of their peers across the developed world. And yet the number of children who have stopped going to school has risen for more than a decade and now stands at its highest point on record.
Those two facts aren’t mutually exclusive. Belonging is a foundational necessity of a good education program, but it’s also a harder metric to track. It’s far easier to record a “sense of belonging” on a survey than to build it organically in a classroom. Or, perhaps better yet, notice when it’s missing from a classroom.
Learning depends on a strong foundation. A key pillar of that foundation is belonging. In this article, we’ll explore what happens to a program, a classroom, and a child when we assume it is already there.
Many teachers feel pressure to begin the academic content at full speed from the very first day, if not the first week at least. There is so much to cover, and trying to “teach hard” to cover all of it, all at once, looks a lot like learning. Teaching hard feels like delivering the experience a school is expected to deliver.
But teaching hard is not the same as learning taking hold. Content doesn’t stick with a child who doesn’t yet feel safe and comfortable in the room. Their guard is up, so to speak. They’re feeling out a new classroom, new friends. A new teacher. Something has to be in place first, and the solution is not just more content.
For the first two months of every school year I taught, although I moved forward with the academic content and built fundamental academic skills, my concern and focus were the students. Were they receptive? Was I reaching them? Underneath the lessons, I wanted to build a room. A community. I was helping the children learn how to work with one another, and with me. I was learning who needed what, who spoke out or kept quiet, who needed a push or who needed space to learn. I was setting, deliberately, the conditions under which everything I taught might eventually land.
To do this, I chose specific activities. I wanted children to have time to form their own thinking first, then share it with a partner, then a group. I built games whose content was academic, but whose real work was learning to communicate. I created collaborative tasks where the problem to solve was a lesson and the skill being learned was how to depend on one another. We built classroom expectations together, then modeled and practiced them throughout the day until they became how the room worked. I ensured a diverse group of children each had a way in. I also made sure they could show what they understood in many different ways—not just quiz scores—so each began to sense their strengths and what they were still working on.
And most years, somewhere past the second month, we started rolling. The room would begin to run itself. Children started sorting out their own small disagreements. The energy I had carried for the class for weeks became something the group held together. However, I made a mistake here in how I treated these first two months. For a long time I mistook this shift as a reward, the calm that arrives once the hard part is behind you.
It took me years to see I had it backward. That quiet was not what came after the real work; it was the foundation, finally solid enough to build on. In those two months, you build a foundation, and one of those pillars is belonging. It’s not a build-and-ignore-it situation either. You have to tend it all year, in a hundred small ways.
But the heavy lifting, the building of the ground itself, was largely done, and everything I taught afterward stood on it.
Belonging begins with feeling valued. A child who senses that they matter in the room, that their presence is noticed and their voice is wanted, starts to feel welcome there. Belonging is a settled sense, so it’s not immediate. For students, it’s a place where they can feel supported in learning, rather than humiliated for not knowing. From that belonging grows the willingness to do what learning actually asks of a child: to say I don’t understand, to try an answer that might be wrong in front of everyone, to be willing to make a mistake, to grow. A child who belongs will take those risks. A child who does not will protect themselves, and protecting yourself looks a great deal like not learning.
For a long time this was just my own conviction, built from years of watching it happen. Later I found a good deal of research saying something similar. One meta-analysis of 82 studies, covering more than 200,000 students, found that a student’s sense of school belonging is consistently associated with stronger engagement and motivation, higher self-concept, and better academic outcomes, and with lower rates of absence and dropping out. These associations are correlations, not proof of cause, but across so many students, the pattern is hard to miss.
Another meta-analysis, this one focused on how schools foster belonging, looked for the factors that matter most in this regard, and the strongest was whether a child felt supported by their teacher. Belonging is built in the relationships of a room, often in those first two months, and much of it is built by the teacher, which is exactly where I had been putting my attention.
I say all this because I think we often have it backward. We treat belonging as something that arrives after learning is going well. In my experience, and I no longer think it was only mine, belonging comes first, and learning grows from that foundation.
Which brings me back to those two facts I could not reconcile at the start. If belonging takes shape in the particular relationships of a room, and if it is the ground learning stands on, then a survey can only ever catch part of it.
A child can report, truthfully, that they belong and still sit quietly, uncomfortably, with their guard up, in a classroom. Measured belonging and lived belonging are not the same thing, and sometimes a child thinks marking that they “don’t belong” will result in negative consequences. I also think “no longer going to school at all” is a solution born from a lack of belonging. “I do not belong there. At least at home I feel safe.”
To clarify, I do not say that to explain non-attendance, which has many causes and deserves more care than a single article can give it. I raise it because it marks, at a scale impossible to ignore, how far the recorded version of belonging and the lived one can drift. And if they can drift that far in a classroom, with a teacher present every day, they can certainly drift inside a program that assumes belonging.
A mistake I often see is when a program assumes the room is already a place where a child feels safe enough, and connected enough, to do what the program asks. Consider one that sets out to develop critical thinking, to get students questioning, debating, voicing opinions of their own. It’s a worthy aim, and a common one. The teacher’s guide says: pose this question, invite students to take a position, ask them to challenge one another and take intellectual risks. And then it moves on, as though the instruction and the outcome were the same thing.
But they aren’t, and any teacher knows that. A student will not offer a half-formed opinion, disagree with a classmate, or risk being wrong out loud, unless the room already feels safe to them. That willingness doesn’t come from the question. It grows out of belonging, out of the weeks of building a room in which a child believes their voice is wanted and their mistakes will not be held against them. The program asks for the fruit of belonging, but assumes the belonging itself is already there.
A program can fall short in two ways. The first is in the design. Sometimes a program never asks what a room must feel like for a child to speak up. Sometimes it asks, acknowledges that belonging matters, but stops there, without building the work of creating that room into the program itself. Recognizing that a child must feel safe to take a risk is not the same as helping a teacher make them feel safe.
The second failure is a gap between the reality the program imagines and the reality of the classroom. Most programs offer the teacher very little to cross that gap. No bridges, no scaffolding, few real strategies for helping this particular group of children become a group in which a child will risk being wrong. The intended experience is handed over intact. The work of building the belonging it rests on is left to the teacher alone.
Often, the program has an answer for this. A single word: adapt. Adapt it to your students. Adapt it for your classroom. On its face, this sounds respectful—a program trusting a teacher’s judgment. But it can also be a way of taking the hardest work in the whole endeavor—building a room where children feel safe enough to do what the program wants—and passing the buck.
Teachers are already stretched, already giving the day everything they have. Asked of a teacher who has something left, the adaptation might be met. Asked of one who does not, it becomes one burden too many. And the program, half realized, never shows the results it was built to produce. Then education program developers are left wondering why a strong program didn’t succeed. The answer is often not in the program at all. It is in the belonging the program assumed, and never helped to build.
A survey can tell us that children feel they belong. It cannot tell us whether the belonging is the kind that holds a child through the hard, exposing work of learning, or the kind that quietly gives way, one child at a time, until a desk sits empty.
I notice in myself a pull, writing this, to end with a method. To offer the steps, the framework, the things a program might do to build belonging rather than assume it. But I’m not going to. That’s the paradox. The moment belonging becomes a checklist, a box a program can tick and move past, it stops being the thing I have been trying to describe. Belonging is built in the particulars, in the nuances, between these children and this teacher, in this room. But I do not mean that as a reason for programs to step back and leave belonging to teachers alone. It’s the opposite.
The fact that belonging is built between particular people, in a particular room, is exactly why a program cannot afford to assume it, and exactly why the most useful thing a program could do is take it seriously, make room for it, help carry it—rather than leaving a teacher to build the whole foundation and cross the distance alone.
So I am left with a question instead of an answer, and I would rather leave you with it than with a false floor of certainty. When a program works in a classroom, how much of that was ever the program, and how much was the work of a teacher who made the room ready to receive it? What would it mean to build as though that work were the point, rather than something we assumed had already been done?
Tomoya Tsutsumi has spent over two decades working at the intersection of Western and Japanese K-12 education, serving as a classroom teacher, a learning program leader at Apple, and the Founder of Unfold Learning Design. His perspectives are grounded in authentic classroom experience and a profound understanding of the elements that make learning effective across cultures.
Tomoya Tsutsumi
Founder & Education Integration Designer