Boys at Unity Middle are learning to feel safe

safe space – At Oakland Unity Middle School, teachers and administrators are reshaping classroom support for boys by building single-sex advisory periods and trust circles where students can share vulnerabilities and catch up on missing work. The approach draws on Ever For

By the time the school day begins, Oakland Unity Middle already has a rule in place that would be uncomfortable in many classrooms: in the first period, boys in advisory can’t opt out of sharing.

In those trust circles. students talk about what they need to finish—assignments that are missing. deadlines that have slipped. and the pressures they’ve been carrying. Teachers and administrators. including Razavi. a humanities teacher and assistant principal of the school. say the goal is simple: to make it possible for students to be vulnerable with other boys and still feel safe.

Immediately after sharing time, each boy tells the group about the class assignments he needs to finish. His classmates respond with advice, encouragement, or even just acknowledgement. Razavi ties the practice to risk and belonging. “That’s where growth happens,” she said. “Growth happens through risk. That’s where kids feel like they’re in community and an indicator of kids feeling a sense of belonging.”.

What happens when that sense of belonging is missing shows up in research and in classrooms, experts say. A sense of belonging—meaning that students feel accepted, respected and supported in school—is crucial for academic success. The stakes can be even higher for boys. who are more likely than girls to repeat kindergarten and lag in reading and writing skills and less likely to graduate from high school.

Ioakim Boutakidis. a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University. Fullerton. and a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men. a nonprofit research and policy group. said the damage often starts earlier than families realize. “Something happens over time so by the time they get to high school. boys don’t feel like they belong in academic settings. ” he said. “And then that hurts academic belonging. the sense that you’re good enough to be successful in these academic spaces.” He added that Rise Together. a fund established by American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves. is one of The Hechinger Report’s many donors.

At Oakland Unity Middle School, educators are trying to break that cycle through a relationship-building program designed to normalize male vulnerability and support boys to be themselves rather than the version they believe they’re expected to perform.

Just over 140 sixth, seventh and eighth graders attend the school, nearly all of them from East Oakland, one of the most ethnically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Bay Area.

The program behind these practices is called Ever Forward. founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch. then a first-year teacher in nearby San Lorenzo. to embrace a philosophy of “radical positivity.” Since 2021. Branch said it has led more than 300 workshops. mostly in Northern California. reaching upwards of 30. 000 teachers and educators.

Unity eighth grader Adrian Polanco said the school feels like a place built for support, not performance. “I feel like this school is kind of my second home,” he said. “We always have someone we can look up to, who has our back, which I think is really good and really important for school to have.”

No one argues that social-emotional support for boys alone will solve academic outcomes. Still, Boutakidis said programming that boosts belonging may be a key way to close the academic gender gap.

Warmth and connection matter a lot to boys, he said, even if they don’t always show it in the way girls often do. “Boys may appear not to care about what adults think of them,” Boutakidis said. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t crave connection.”

That dynamic can also mislead adults. Matt Englar-Carlson. a professor of counseling and the co-director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton. said it can be difficult for teachers to read boys’ behavior as anything other than disengagement—or even antagonism—especially with adolescent boys.

“When you think what’s happening is disrespect in the classroom. the reality is that it typically isn’t. because they’re not performing for you. ” Englar-Carlson said. “They’re performing for their peers around them. He can ridicule you and save face in front of his friends and act like he doesn’t care.”.

Once teachers recognize that pattern, Englar-Carlson said they can adapt how they respond. Instead of calling out a male student in front of the class. teachers might move beside him and speak quietly while walking around the room. “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.”.

Branch’s own path into the work began with those misread signals—and with anger he says students could not always control.

A wrestler and football player while attending East Oakland public schools, Branch now wears his hair in long braids and has an easy, warm smile and laugh. After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he worked as a civil engineer before going into teaching.

As one of just a few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School, about 20 miles south of Oakland, Branch said he began seeing young men redirect frustration toward him in ways he didn’t understand at first.

“I saw young men who were brilliant. but the way they were acting in front of class was really difficult. ” he said. “I would tell them, ‘Young man, you want to fight with me because it looks good with your peers?. I’m not here to fight you. I’m not your enemy. You’re a high schooler. I’m an adult with a job. What are we arguing about?. I want you to succeed.’”.

He invited male students to have lunch with him once a week and asked what he could do to become a better teacher. What he heard, Branch said, was that students’ lives were too difficult for school to be a priority. Students described “crashing out”—sudden outbursts of rage and emotion—after dealing with one emotional “land mine” after another.

“A kid getting pushed down the hall, he ignores it, ignores it, and then all of a sudden he turns around and boom,” Branch said, making an explosion gesture with both hands. “And then he gets in trouble, right?”

Branch recalled being encouraged as a teacher to leave his own problems “in the glove compartment” before coming to work. But he said he couldn’t keep pretending. “I tried to do that, but I realized I was so fake,” he said. Instead, he became honest with students about how he was doing. “I would tell them, ‘I had a rough weekend. A lot of drama happened in my life. Today’s not a good day.’”.

Branch calls that approach “normalizing vulnerability.” He said it’s essential for young men to be themselves as people and as students.

He turned the weekly lunches into a club, the Ever Forward Club, where young men could gather to process emotions. Over a decade, he developed the program and expanded it to more schools, eventually leaving his job to build the program and provide professional development for educators.

At the heart of the Ever Forward Club is a project-based tool Branch calls Masks, Emotions and Math. During workshops, he guides young men to explore the ways they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult emotions from view.

Since the club started in 2004, Branch said every participating student has graduated from high school and 93 percent have transitioned to college, the military or a trade school.

He expanded the work beyond students by creating professional development for educators, which he called the Million Mask Movement.

Tony Farrell. head of Stuart Hall High School—the boys’ segment of a school in San Francisco affiliated with Schools of the Sacred Heart*—recalled an event Branch led at his school ten years ago. Farrell said two hundred male high school students sat in a big circle in the school’s gymnasium. Branch handed out pens and paper and instructed students to write on one side of the paper how they appear to the world. On the other side, he said, they should write the stuff the world doesn’t know about them.

Farrell said the activity ended in a snowball fight: “Then they crumpled the papers up 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 picked a paper ball, smoothed it out and, one at a time, read what another boy had written. Farrell recalled boys reading, “You wouldn’t know from looking at me that my parents are getting a divorce” and “You wouldn’t know from looking at me that my grandma’s really sick.”

“It was really powerful,” Farrell said. “Not to get woo-woo, but it was like an electric field.”

Branch led a Masks, Emotions and Math event at Oakland Unity Middle School two years ago. Since then. teachers at the school have integrated elements of Branch’s work into routine practices. including how the school manages disciplinary issues. That’s also where Razavi got the idea to offer single-sex advisory periods.

Some boys, Razavi said, need a space where they can open up to other boys 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 evident drop in sense of belonging over time for boys, then we need to work on making boys feel like they belong,” she said. “And we need to work on that earlier.”

Students say the warmth shows up in how adults treat them day to day.

Eighth grader Fierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after his old middle school closed. He wants to go to college and study something health-related. Hill described the support he gets from his teachers as “warming.”

“You’re able to tell them stuff that you couldn’t tell other people,” he said. “and they just have this different energy that makes you comfortable.”

Seventh grader Jubran Sulaiman agreed. “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 any work they haven’t turned in. Chris Bibbens Williams is the teacher in charge of the Learning Lab. He said the Masks, Emotions and Math event helped otherwise shy students engage more deeply with their peers.

“You’re gonna have some kids who are more confident in talking 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. ” Williams said. “That’s one thing that I love about this school is that we really allow kids to be themselves. and we build those deep relationships.”.

When he isn’t in the Learning Lab, Williams is on campus—playing basketball with students and hanging out with them in the cafeteria.

”When you build those relationships, kids come to you,” he said.

Recently, Williams approached an eighth grader who hadn’t been completing his language arts assignments. Was he not doing the work because it was too hard, or because he lacked confidence? Williams brought the student over and asked him to read a passage aloud.

“I had him come over and read the passage to me,” Williams said. “and I discovered it was truly just him not being confident in his reading.”

With Williams sitting with him, the student worked his way through the words he wasn’t familiar with. Since then, Williams said he has noticed a change in the boy’s confidence level.

“He’s attempting more,” he said. “and that’s all I could ask for.”

The sequence of what these educators are trying is clear: a first period built around unavoidable sharing, teachers who respond in ways that reduce public exposure, and learning support that follows students into the moments they struggle—assignments, confidence, and the risk of being seen.

boys education school belonging social emotional learning single-sex advisory Ever Forward Ashanti Branch Masks Emotions and Math Oakland Unity Middle School academic gender gap