This article appeared as "The End We Start From" in the Winter 2026 issue of Independent School.
In education circles, we’ve been talking for a while now about the importance of creating a community of belonging. As Brené Brown points out in The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection, and Courage, “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people.” Similarly, Carol Dweck’s growth mindset—allowing people to see challenges and differences as opportunities for learning rather than threats—is strongly linked to belonging, creating the space for individuals to take risks, recognize potential in others, and embrace challenges together.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, for high-level learning to take place when students are worried about whether they are safe and how they can build connections with their peers. Creating this sense of belonging and safety as quickly as possible as schools onboard new students––and continuing to focus on this work during their first months on campus––is crucial. On their first day, the most pressing question on students’ minds as they are entering a new school––middle school children especially––isn’t about academic subjects like math or English but about who they’re going to sit with at lunch.
At Windward School (CA), which starts at seventh grade, we have been intentional in our work to help new students feel a sense of belonging as quickly as possible.
After Enrollment
Our work to build bonds among our students begins as soon as we conclude the admissions process in March, five months before students experience their first day of classes.
After families sign contracts, we send care packages with Windward swag and invite families to a spiritware sale on campus the following weekend. We also immediately send students forms to choose their electives, PE/athletics, and after-school opportunities. It might seem early, but it helps build excitement for students and families when they can start to see how they’ll connect with others with similar interests.
And in a less exciting but necessary move, we bring students to campus for a math placement assessment; with students coming from different schools, it’s important to place them in math classes that will be appropriately challenging based on what they have experienced and mastered at their previous schools. This hardly feels welcoming on the surface, but we have turned this event into a community-building opportunity.
Teachers and coaches who oversee a range of activities—art, basketball, dance, robotics, volleyball—work to create and run activities that foster bonding so that students can meet adults who might become important to them, and they can start to bond with other students with similar interests. For example, the art teachers group students in pairs, making sure not to partner students who know one another. Students design and illustrate a postcard for their partner and write them a message. Teachers collect the postcards and mail them to the appropriate student shortly before school begins. By the end of this event, students have started to meet a few of their classmates, and they often leave with plans to connect outside of school.
And just before the end of their sixth grade year, we invite students and families to gather for a barbecue on our playing field. It’s informal and intentionally lacks adult-run activities. There are games and balls, and students quickly separate from their parents and guardians to find their classmates and start playing. The key to this event is for the adults to stay out of the way; left to their own devices, middle school students are perfectly capable of creating their own fun. While the students are off playing, the adults begin to connect with each other as well.
The Summer Before
We offer a series of one-week academic, arts, and athletic programs that allow students to fit our camps around their summer schedules. One of these programs, Camp Windward, is only open to incoming seventh grade students. Cohorts of about 20 to 30 students come to campus for a week to participate in activities like the Marshmallow Challenge and the Gumdrop Communications Relay, which require teamwork and communication, and to take field trips off campus. This makes the campus feel less intimidating and overwhelming and helps students build connections for the upcoming year while they are still on summer break.
Just before school begins, we host a mandatory three-day orientation for all incoming seventh graders. During the first two days, students break into six groups, in which we intentionally separate those who already know each other. Students rotate through 10 different activities that middle school teachers and administrators facilitate to help them acclimate to the school and get to know one another. Students work in teams to solve an escape room designed and facilitated by our English teachers and based on their summer reading; they work with the science teachers on a partnered lab based on identity; and they explore the CREATE Studio and IDEAS Lab (our maker and innovation spaces) with the teachers who run those programs. On the third day of orientation, students receive their school-issued iPads and learn how to use some of the applications they will need for class.
During this orientation, we establish clear expectations about how students are going to treat one another. One session is devoted to belonging, which is designed to help students understand how to function in a community that is larger and more diverse than most of the schools from which they came. Students also work with Lori Getz, a cyber education expert, who helps them think about how they will navigate their relationships online. Many of the mistakes that can damage new students’ sense of belonging take place online, when students fail to realize the impact their online behavior has on other students. We have found that addressing this topic before the school year begins reduces the harm students experience. (Knowing that technology management requires strong partnership with families, Getz also meets with new seventh grade parents and guardians after the school year begins.)
During orientation, new students also meet their peer counselors, a group of about 40 students in 10th through 12th grade who help create a sense of belonging for the younger children. The selection process for peer counselors is intense, including a written application and oral interview. If chosen, the peer counselors participate in a 12-week training program with the middle school counselor to learn the essential components of counseling (empathy, confidentiality, when to break confidentiality, etc.). Peer counselors do not receive compensation or get community service credit; they genuinely care about supporting our youngest students, and they want to pay forward the support they received when they entered the school. Providing our new students with well-trained, older mentors has proven to be highly valuable in the transition process.
The New School Year
Once the school year begins and throughout the transition process, we lean on our older students through Core Groups, a program that places students in small “families” with those from other grade levels. Seniors learn how to take the lead in Core Groups during the senior retreat before the school year begins, and our initial group meetings take place on the first Friday of the school year. Older students also lead our affinity groups that begin meeting during the second week of school. During the third week, we hold our Clubs Fair. By creating various ways for students to be part of smaller groups right at the beginning of the year, we have been able to help students feel a sense of connection and meet both mentors and peers with similar interests.
One of the most important components of our efforts to help our new seventh graders develop a sense of belonging is the seventh grade retreat, which takes place during the third or fourth week of each school year. The entire class, and their peer counselors, spend two nights at Lake Arrowhead. Some students and families feel anxious about a trip so soon in the school year, but we have found that the timing of the trip helps foster the kind of connections we want to build.
Middle school administrators and teachers facilitate the trip. We assign students to rooms, separating those who came from the same schools, and students participate in a range of activities. A professionally facilitated ropes course challenges students to be vulnerable and to support one another in taking risks. Students perform in front of their peers at Talent Night and compete in teams in various athletic and nonathletic activities during the Seventh Grade Olympics. By the end of the trip, students feel like true Windwardians, and every year at graduation, seniors talk about the importance of the retreat in developing their sense of comfort at Windward.
Greater Goals
At Windward, we believe that the seventh grade transition is seamless—and that’s what students and their families are telling us, too. Through surveys administered by Challenge Success—a nonprofit we’ve worked with to implement research-based strategies that improve student well-being—students report a strong sense of belonging and connection to their peers and the adults on campus. This shows that the programs we currently have in place are working.
But there’s always more work to be done. The summer before seventh grade might also offer an opportunity for us to develop programs around skill-building. This is a natural way to foster connection and shared experiences while helping to prepare students for the academic and social challenges ahead. We could design activities, such as book clubs or reading challenges, writing workshops or math and science labs, and even planner practice or time management activities as a way to bring students together around shared interests. Service learning could also be incorporated into this work, truly prioritizing community and a sense of belonging.
In The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, Daniel Coyle suggests that belonging works “as a flame that needs to be continually fed by signals of safe connection.” Indeed, belonging is something that requires constant attention, but with intention and thought at the forefront of the transition process, we are able to get the flame to burn brightly right from the start of our students’ experiences.