Boys open up early, belonging follows through school

make boys – At Oakland Unity Middle School in East Oakland, a simple morning advisory—where boys share something vulnerable and then name the assignments they’re still missing—has become part of a broader effort to reverse boys’ academic alienation. Teachers and researche

OAKLAND, Calif. — It’s a Friday morning at Oakland Unity Middle School, a public charter school tucked between residential buildings in East Oakland. Inside a classroom, Austin Razavi stands before 15 mixed-grade middle school boys who have pulled their desks into a messy circle.

He starts with a prompt and a promise of time. “I’ll give you 10, 15 seconds to think about it,” Razavi tells them. “Then each of you share something most people don’t know about you.”

There’s shuffling and silence. A few boys ask for more time before one finally speaks. “I like to play videos.” Another adds, “I like to play with my little siblings.” Then a third boy says, plainly: “A little-known fact about me is that half of my lung is missing.”

In classrooms across campus, girls-only and all-gender advisories meet too. Students choose which type they’re assigned to. During these trust circles. students can’t opt out of sharing—because this first period sets the tone for the day. Razavi and other teachers say the goal is not just confession for confession’s sake. but what comes next: classmates step in to support one another in finishing missing assignments by the end of the day.

Razavi, a humanities teacher and assistant principal, talks about it like a door opening. “That’s where growth happens,” he 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.”

Experts who study schooling agree on the stakes. Belonging—students feeling accepted, respected and supported in school—is crucial for academic success. For boys, the need is sharper. Boys are more likely than girls to repeat kindergarten and to lag in reading and writing skills. and they are less likely to graduate from high school.

At Oakland Unity, the advisory is designed to meet boys where they often fall away. The problem, researchers say, can begin far earlier than middle 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. said boys often receive a message early in life that they’re not good students. “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.”.

At the school, that theory becomes a practice. Ever Forward is the relationship-building program Razavi and others are drawing on—one meant to normalize male vulnerability and support boys to be themselves rather than what they feel they’re expected to be.

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

Ever Forward wasn’t designed for a single campus. It was founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch, then a first-year teacher in nearby San Lorenzo. Branch’s philosophy was “radical positivity.” Since 2021. Branch said. Ever Forward has led more than 300 workshops—mostly in Northern California—reaching upwards of 30. 000 teachers and educators.

For students, the impact is personal and immediate.

“I feel like this school is kind of 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, who has our back, which I think is really good and really important for school to have.”

No one claims social-emotional support for boys alone will solve academic gaps. But belonging, many researchers argue, may be a key lever. And for boys, that belonging has a particular shape.

Boutakidis said warmth and connection matter a lot to boys even when they don’t demonstrate it in the way girls often do. Boys may appear not to care what adults think, but that doesn’t mean they don’t crave connection.

In the classroom, that mismatch can be costly. Matt Englar-Carlson, a professor of counseling and the co-director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton, described how teachers can struggle to connect when boys look disengaged.

“This can make it hard for some teachers to connect with boys in the classroom and even read boys’ behavior as so disengaged as to be antagonistic. ” Englar-Carlson said. “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. 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 understand that dynamic, Englar-Carlson said they can adapt how they respond—like asking boys questions in a different way. Instead of calling out a male student in front of the class, teachers might come up next to him while walking around and talk softly, at his 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.”

Branch’s own path into this work started with what he saw in East Oakland classrooms years ago. A wrestler and football player while attending East Oakland public schools, he now wears his hair in long braids and carries the easy, warm smile of someone who has learned how to build trust.

After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Branch worked as a civil engineer before going into teaching. About 20 miles south of Oakland, he became one of just a few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School. He said he quickly noticed anger and frustration vented toward him.

“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.’”.

To reach them, Branch began inviting some male students to have lunch with him once a week and asking what he could do to be a better teacher. What he heard wasn’t about schoolwork alone. He described students’ lives as too difficult for school to be a priority.

Students talked about “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?”

He said he’d been encouraged, early in his teaching career, to leave his own problems “in the glove compartment” before coming to work.

“I tried to do that, but I realized I was so fake,” Branch said. Instead, he began being 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.’”

He calls that approach “normalizing vulnerability,” describing it as an essential step for young men to be themselves as people and as students.

The weekly lunches became the Ever Forward Club, where young men could process emotions. Branch spent a decade developing the program, expanding it to more schools, and 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 he calls Masks, Emotions and Math. During workshops, Branch guides young men to explore the ways they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult emotions from view.

Branch said that since the club started in 2004, every participating student has graduated from high school, and 93 percent have transitioned to college, the military or a trade school. He also expanded the work to include professional development for educators, calling it the Million Mask Movement.

In San Francisco, Tony Farrell, head of Stuart Hall High School—the boys’ segment of a Jesuit school—still remembers a Branch event from about ten years ago. Farrell said that event brought 200 male high school students into a big circle in the school’s gymnasium. Branch handed out pens and paper.

“He instructed students to write on one side of the paper how they appear to the world,” Farrell recalled. “On the other side, he said, write the stuff the world doesn’t know about them.”

They crumpled the papers up and threw them at each other.

“It was a snowball fight,” Farrrell said. “We had a perfectly, wonderfully randomized pile of crumpled paper.”

Then, one at a time, boys picked a paper ball, smoothed it out, and read what another boy had written.

Farrell remembered 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.”

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

Two years ago, Branch led a Masks, Emotions and Math 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. 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,” he said. “And we need to work on that earlier.”

On a regular Wednesday at the school, that belief shows up in a quieter setting: the Learning Lab. Eighth grader Fierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after his old middle school closed. He said he wants to go to college and study something health-related. Hill describes the support he gets from 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.”

In the Learning Lab, Hill and other students get help completing work they haven’t turned in. Chris Bibbens Williams is the teacher in charge of the lab. He said the Masks, Emotions and Math event Branch led 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 Williams isn’t in the Learning Lab, he 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.

Recently, Williams approached an eighth grader who hadn’t been completing his language arts assignments. Williams said he had to figure out what lay beneath the missing work.

“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 moved through the passage and read 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.”

For a school trying to keep boys from falling out of academic life, that might be the most measurable shift: not just grades, but the moment a student decides it’s safe enough to try.

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