“From Chaos to Community”: Inclusive Community Building in Middle Schools

Middle school is a very interesting time for students in terms of developing and maintaining relationships with their teachers and their peers. As many students transition from elementary school to middle school, relationships with their peers become even more of a priority than relationships with adults (Prewitt et al., 2019). Even though middle school students greatly value relationships with their peers, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily proficient at developing and maintaining these relationships. In fact, as students move on from elementary school to middle school, many young people experience a “normative decline in relationship quality” (Duong et al., 2019, p.212) as a result of “an increase in social, academic, and physiological challenges faced by middle school students” (Reimer, 2023).

This is where middle school teachers can play a critical role in helping students connect with their schools and their classmates (Nasir, Jones, and McLaughlin (2011). It has been well established that positive teacher-student connections are important for social and academic reasons at all grade levels (Davis, 2001; Reimer, 2014; Reimer 2020, Reimer, 2023). For example, positive teacher-student connections have been attributed to “higher grades and graduation rates” (Nasir, Jones, & McLaughlin, 2011, p.1755).