{"id":200899,"date":"2019-04-30T12:05:04","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T16:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=200899"},"modified":"2023-07-03T12:55:50","modified_gmt":"2023-07-03T16:55:50","slug":"ucapp-student-project-strives-to-build-a-sense-of-belonging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2019\/04\/ucapp-student-project-strives-to-build-a-sense-of-belonging\/","title":{"rendered":"UCAPP Student Project Strives to Build a Sense of Belonging"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past academic year, Neag School graduate student and high school English teacher Leszek Ward studied the effectiveness of regularly bringing small groups of students together with faculty advisors during homeroom at New Haven Academy, to determine whether implementing a structured protocol across certain groups would increase students\u2019 sense of belonging.<\/p>\n

Ward\u2019s project won second place for the Lynn Hall Teacher Action Research Prize, an award which led him to discuss his work during the networking expo at the\u00a0Yale School of Management Education Leadership Conference<\/a>\u00a0held in New Haven, Conn., in April.<\/p>\n

Ward is a student in the\u00a0University of Connecticut Administrator Preparation Program<\/a>\u00a0(UCAPP), a program within the Neag School that aims to prepare highly qualified school leaders to serve school communities across the state of Connecticut. UCAPP culminates in a capstone project, referred to as the change project, that allows students to take what they have learned through coursework to identify a need for change in schools and lead real-world improvement work.<\/p>\n

UCAPP culminates in a capstone project, referred to as the change project, that allows students to take what they have learned through coursework to identify a need for change in schools and lead real-world improvement work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taking Steps to Foster Connectedness<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ward is in his 11th year of teaching at New Haven Academy, an interdistrict magnet school that serves 300 students from grades 9 through 12. New Haven Academy prides itself on being a school learning community where all members, including staff, students, and parents, know each other well, but Ward wanted to take this idea to the next level.<\/p>\n

Ward focused his UCAPP change project on what are known as \u201cadvisory groups\u201d\u00a0\u2014 small groups of students, each led by a faculty advisor, which meet for 10 minutes in homeroom at the start of each school day and for 30-minute advisory sessions twice a week.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese groups are meant to be a student\u2019s \u2018school family,\u2019 a place where they are known and supported by at least one adult in the building, as well as a group of peers,\u201d states Ward in\u00a0his change project report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Through an initial round of surveys, however, Ward and a group of seven fellow teachers found that these advisory groups were not doing enough to foster a sense of connectedness between students and their faculty advisors.<\/p>\n

Ward says he chose advisory groups as the focus of his project because these groups already met consistently and because implementing a common homeroom protocol among certain groups was a small, manageable change that could potentially have a greater outside impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came up with the protocol by sharing our own experiences in advisory,\u201d Ward says. \u201cWe also tried to look at a few other schools, read a chapter of\u00a0The\u00a0<\/em>Culture Code\u00a0<\/em>by Daniel Coyle, and put all those different learning experiences together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The homeroom protocol, which was implemented across eight advisory groups, included the following steps:<\/p>\n