How Are the Children?

Dr. Alexandra Sundman

Among the Maasai people of East Africa, where one might expect warriors to exchange a word about the weather or the state of the harvest, the traditional greeting is a question: Kasserian Ingera? "And how are the children?" The reply, even from warriors with no children of their own, is Sapati Ingera. "All the children are well." (Source.)

This greeting reveals something essential about what that culture values most. 

The health of the community is measured by the well-being of its most vulnerable members.

This year, Potomac's teachers have been exploring a version of that question together, not just whether our students are safe, fed, and earning good grades, but something harder to measure and, at times, easier to miss: 

Do they feel like they belong here?
Do they feel like they matter?
And when they do, does that change how they show up, their willingness to take risks, to ask for help, to own their learning?

That last question is about agency, a student's capacity to direct their own learning. And it has been at the center of two of this year’s faculty professional development sessions. Led by a team of teachers and administrators, these sessions have drawn on the work of Stanford social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen, Columbia researcher Nicole Furlonge, and others.

Three Tools

We began our first session with a simple exercise; we asked teachers to stand and remain standing if they'd ever pretended to text someone while feeling awkward at a party. Or refrained from ordering a dish in a restaurant because they couldn’t pronounce it. Or held back an idea in a meeting because they worried someone else would say it better.

At the end of the activity, almost everyone was still standing—a quiet, slightly uncomfortable moment of recognition.

And that was the point. 

Social psychologists call this belonging uncertainty,  the nagging doubt that we're fully accepted. And belonging uncertainty turns out to be a universal human experience. 

It also turns out to be consequential. 

Cohen's research shows that when students feel unseen or undervalued, their brains respond as if they're in physical danger. The regions responsible for empathy and higher-order thinking begin to go quiet. The stress hormone cortisol floods the system. A student in that state isn't choosing to disengage. They are, in a very real neurochemical sense, unable to engage.

To be clear: none of this displaces the essential, ongoing work of recognizing stereotype threat, interrupting bias, developing culturally competent pedagogy, and ensuring equitable access for every student. That work remains central to who we are.

Yet the research also makes clear that uncertainty about belonging is not confined to any one group or category of people. Belonging uncertainty can surface in any child (or adult, for that matter) on any given day. 

And that universality carries its own imperative: our teachers must build environments of belonging for all children, because every child needs that foundation to thrive.

With that understanding, we introduced three research-backed practices that any teacher, in any division, can put to work.

US and IS Counselor Dr. Paul Singleton walked us through Situation Crafting, the art of designing environments where belonging happens by structure rather than by chance — classroom jobs in the Lower School, jigsaw activities where every student holds a piece the group needs, mentoring roles where older students discover they're essential to someone else's experience.

MS Teacher Alisha McClain explained the promise of Wise Interventions, which centers on the power of a single sentence. Cohen's team found that when teachers paired critical feedback with a brief message of high expectations and belief — "I'm giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know you can reach them" — revision rates quadrupled.

Finally, Director of Servicer Learning, Joy Webster, emphasized the necessity of Perspective Getting, resisting what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error. Instead of asking "What's wrong with this student?" when a child is disruptive or disengaged, we must ask"What is happening to this student?"

From Belonging to Agency

The second session pushed the conversation from belonging to agency — from feeling safe to owning your learning.

Most educators carry some version of Maslow's hierarchy in their heads: meet basic needs first, then safety, then belonging, then achievement. 

But drawing on the work of Floyd Cobb and John Krownapple, our faculty examined how schools and teachers can unwittingly rearrange that order. Some skip belonging entirely, leaping straight from safety to achievement. Others treat belonging as a reward for performance: prove yourself first, and then we'll let you in. 

The research argues for a different sequence: belonging must come before achievement. 

Director of Learning Support Alex Helwink shared the neuroscience backing this premise. Explaining the dance between the hormones cortisol and oxytocin, she showed how a student who doesn't feel valued and safe will never take the intellectual risks that real learning demands. Belonging must be the precondition. Agency, the capacity to own your challenges, grows from it.

The session also introduced a fourth tool for our faculty toolkit: Prepositional Listening, developed by Nicole Furlonge at Columbia's Teachers College. 

Instead of treating listening as a single skill you either perform or don't, Furlonge identifies a set of stances: listen to, listen for, listen beneath, listen with, listen across, and so forth. 

Listening to is the baseline, and it signals direct attention. Listening for tunes into what's not being said:  the folded arms, the flat "I'm fine." Listening beneath asks what fear or need might be driving a student's words. 

At the close of this session, our teachers reflected on their default stance(s) and chose one new mode to try in the week ahead.

But perhaps the most powerful moment in the April session didn't come from the research at all. Four faculty members, Potomac's Cultural Competence and DEI leaders from each division, stood before their colleagues and shared personal stories of belonging uncertainty from their own lives. A time when a stranger made an assumption based on visible identity. When a teacher felt judged or had assumptions made about him due to his gender. 

Different people. Different contexts. The same unmistakable feeling. 

The room was noticeably quiet when they finished. 

If adults with professional standing and a supportive community can still feel unsure of their welcome, imagine being fourteen or nine.

Why This Matters

The belonging work isn't separate from Potomac's Strategic Roadmap. It is the Strategic Roadmap. 

Excellent Teaching requires students who feel safe enough to take intellectual risks. Inspired Students cannot develop curiosity when their brains are in survival mode. Connected Community starts with each person feeling seen and respected.

And the research is encouraging: these interventions work, and they don't require heroic effort. 

A greeting at the door.
A sentence asserting belief in a student on a returned paper.
A moment of curiosity about what a student's behavior might actually mean.

One study found that simply telling a group of teenagers that feeling out of place was normal cut the achievement gap in half.

Sometimes it really is just one sentence. And the impact can last for years.

Kasserian Ingera. How are the children?

The children are in good hands. And our teachers are making sure of it. Every day.