Then another: “I like to play with my little brothers and sisters.”
And then: “A little known fact about me is that half of my lung is missing.”
Other classrooms on campus also feature girls-only and all-gender counselors; students choose which type to be assigned to. During these trust circles, students can’t stop sharing because this first period sets the tone for the day. Students will rely on each other for support to complete missing assignments for the rest of the day, and teachers and administrators like Razavi want students to feel safe being vulnerable with each other.
Immediately after sharing time, each boy tells the group about the class assignments he has to complete. Their classmates offer advice, encouragement or simple recognition.
“That’s where the growth happens,” said Razavi, a humanities teacher and assistant principal at the school. “Growth happens through risk. It’s where kids feel like they’re in a community, and it’s an indicator of kids feeling a sense of belonging.”
Experts agree that a sense of belonging — meaning that students feel accepted, respected and supported at school — is critical to academic success. This is perhaps even more true for boys, who are more prone than girls repeat kindergarten and I’m behind reading and writing skills and less likely to graduated from high school.
But this safety eludes many boys who get the message at an early age that they are not good students.
“Something happens over time so that by the time they get to high school, boys don’t feel like they belong in academia,” said Joachim Boutakidis, a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University, Fullerton, and a research fellow at the American Institute on Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group. “And then that hurts academic belonging, the feeling that you’re good enough to be successful in those academic spaces.” (Rise Together, a fund created by American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves, is one of The Hechinger Report’s many donors.)
At Oakland Unity Middle School, teachers are trying to break that cycle through the relationship-building program, which is designed to normalize male vulnerability and support boys in being themselves instead of what they think is expected of them. Just over 140 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students attend the school, almost all of them from East Oakland—one of the most ethnically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Bay Area.
The Ever Forward program was founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch, then a first-year teacher in nearby San Lorenzo, to embrace a philosophy of “radical positivity.” As of 2021, Branch says he has led more than 300 workshops, mostly in Northern California, reaching more than 30,000 teachers and educators.
“I feel like this school is kind of like my second home,” said Unity eighth-grader Adrian Polanco, who wants to study business in college. “We always have someone we can look up to that has our backs, which I think is really good and really important for the school to have.”
No one is arguing that social-emotional support for boys alone will help them do better academically, but experts say belongingness-enhancing programming could be key to closing the academic gender gap.
Warmth and connection matter a lot to boys, even if they don’t always demonstrate those needs by responding to questions and expectations as girls often do, Boutakidis said. Boys may not seem to care what adults think of them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t crave a relationship.
That can make it difficult for some teachers to connect with boys in the classroom and even perceive boys’ behavior as so disengaged as to be antagonistic, said Matt Englar-Carlson, professor of counseling and co-director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton. This may be especially true for adolescent boys.
“When you think what’s going on is disrespect in the classroom, the reality is it’s usually not because they’re not showing up for you,” Englar-Carlson said. “They present themselves to the peers around them. He might make fun of you and save face in front of his friends and act like he doesn’t care.”
Once teachers begin to recognize when this is happening, they can adapt their teaching, he said, by asking boys questions differently. Instead of calling a student to the front of the class, teachers can approach them as they walk around the classroom and speak to them quietly, at their level.
“So now it’s actually a private conversation between the two of you,” he said, “and you don’t actually have to call out bad behavior.”
Ashanti Branch learned early on the challenges facing male students. A wrestler and football player while attending public schools in East Oakland, he now wears his hair in long braids and has a light, warm smile and laugh. After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Branch worked as a civil engineer before beginning teaching.
As one of the few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School about 20 miles south of Oakland, Branch soon found students taking out their anger and frustration on him.
“I saw young men who were brilliant, but the way they carried themselves in front of the class was really difficult,” he said. “I would tell them, ‘Young man, you want to fight me because it looks good with your peers?’ I’m not here to fight you. I am not your enemy. You are a high school student. I am a working adult. What are we arguing about? I want you to succeed.
He invited several male students to lunch with him once a week and asked them how he could be a better teacher. What they told him was that their lives were too difficult for school to be a priority. The students describe “breaking out”—sudden outbursts of rage and emotion—after encountering one emotional “land mine” after another.
“A kid that’s pushed down the hall, he ignores it, ignores it, and then all of a sudden he turns around and boom,” Branch said, making an explosive gesture with both hands. “And then he’s in trouble, isn’t he?”
Branch recalls that as a teacher he was encouraged to leave his own problems “in the glove box” before coming to work.
“I tried to do it, but I realized I was such a fake,” he said. Instead, he was honest with his students about how he was doing. “I would tell them, ‘I had a rough weekend. Many dramas happened in my life. Today is not a good day.” He calls this approach “normalizing vulnerability”—an important step for young men to be themselves as people and as students.
Branch turned weekly lunches with students into a club, the Ever Forward Clubwhere young men can gather to process their emotions. He spent a decade developing the program and expanding it to more schools, eventually leaving his job to build the program and provide professional development for educators.
At the heart of Ever Forward Club is a project-based tool that Branch calls Masks, Emotions and Math. During the workshops, Branch guides young men to explore the ways in which they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult emotions from view.
Since the club started in 2004, every participating student has graduated from high school and 93 percent have gone on to college, military or trade school, Branch said. He expanded the work to include professional development for educators, calling it Movement for millions of masks.
Tony Farrell, Head of Stewart Hall High School — the boys’ section of a San Francisco school affiliated with the Schools of the Sacred Heart* — recalls an event the branch held at his school ten years ago. Two hundred male high school students sat in a large circle in the school’s gym, Farrell said, and Branch passed out pens and paper. He instructed the students to write on one side of the paper what they looked like to the world. On the other hand, he said, write the things the world doesn’t know about.
Then they crumpled the papers and threw them at each other.
“It was a snowball fight,” Farrell said. “We had a perfectly, wonderfully randomized pile of crumpled paper.”
Then each boy took a ball of paper, flattened it, and one by one read what another boy had written.
Farrell recalled the boys reading, “You wouldn’t know by looking at me that my parents were getting divorced” and “You wouldn’t know by looking at me that my grandma was really sick.”
“Not to get a woo-woo, but it was like an electric field,” he said. “It was really loud.”
Two years ago, Branch led a Masks, emotions and mathematics an event at Oakland Unity Middle School. Since then, teachers at the school have integrated elements of Branch’s work into routine practices, including how the school manages disciplinary issues. This is also where Razavi got the idea to offer single-sex advisory periods.
Some guys need a space where they can open up to other guys, he said, without the social dynamics that can come with all-gender groups.
“If you know that belonging matters, and you know that there’s this very clear decline in boys’ sense of belonging over time, then we need to work on making boys feel like they belong,” he said. “And we need to work on it sooner.”
Eighth-grader Fierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after his old middle school closed. He wants to go to college and study something related to health. He describes the support he receives from his teachers at the school as “warming”.
“You’re able to say things to them that you wouldn’t be able to say to other people,” he said, “and they just have this different energy that makes you feel comfortable.”
“I understand,” agreed seventh-grader Jubran Suleiman. “We can all, what’s the word? Express ourselves.”
On Wednesdays, Hill and other students go to the school’s learning lab, where they get help completing work they haven’t turned in. Chris Bibens Williams is the teacher in charge of the learning lab. He said the Masks, Emotions and Maths event that Branch led at the school helped otherwise shy students engage more deeply with their peers.
“You’ll have some kids who are more confident about speaking in front of everyone, but even the kids who weren’t confident, it just seemed like because the space was positive, it was a chance for them to say how they felt in the moment,” he said. “One thing I love about this school is that we really let the kids be themselves and build these deep relationships.”
When he’s not in the teaching lab, Williams can be found all over campus — playing basketball with students and hanging out with them in the cafeteria.
“When you build those relationships, kids come to you,” he said.
Williams recently addressed an eighth-grader who hadn’t completed his language arts assignments. Was he not doing the work because it was too difficult or because he lacked confidence?
“I had him come and read the passage to me,” Williams said, “and I found that he really just wasn’t confident in his reading.”
As Williams sat with him, the student made his way through the aisle and read words he was unfamiliar with. Since then, Williams has noticed a change in the boy’s confidence level.
“He’s trying harder,” he said, “and that’s all I can ask for.”
Contact editor Christina Samuels at (212) 678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org.
