Most teachers know that students learn best when they feel safe, supported, and respected. But belonging and esteem ask us to go one step further.

A student may feel physically safe in a classroom and still wonder, “Do I really belong here?” A student may follow the rules and complete assignments while quietly believing, “This class is not really for someone like me.” A student may appear unmotivated, resistant, or withdrawn when the deeper issue is that the classroom has not yet communicated, in ways the student can recognize, “You are welcome here, and you matter.”

Design Area VIII of the Marzano Academies CBE Instructional Model focuses on belonging and esteem. In the Marzano Academies model, this design area addresses students’ perceptions of whether they are welcome members of the classroom community and whether they are valued within that community. The model also makes an important connection to self-regulation: students are less likely to manage their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors productively if they do not feel accepted and valued by the community around them. This is why belonging and esteem are not separate from instruction. They are part of the context that allows instruction to work.

Design Area VIII includes four elements:

• VIIIa: Using verbal and nonverbal behaviors that indicate affection
• VIIIb: Demonstrating value and respect for reluctant learners
• VIIIc: Understanding students’ backgrounds and interests
• VIIId: Providing opportunities for students to talk about themselves

Together, these elements help teachers move from general care to intentional practice. They remind us that students do not experience belonging because we say the classroom is welcoming. They experience belonging because the daily life of the classroom shows them they are known, valued, and invited into the learning community.

Why: Belonging and Esteem Make Self-Regulation Possible

In the Marzano Academies model, belonging and esteem sit within the broader domain of self-regulation. Self-regulation is not simply a student trait. It is shaped by the environment in which students are asked to regulate themselves. A learner who feels ignored or disconnected from the classroom community may have a much harder time taking academic risks or finding another pathway around an obstacle to the learning goal.

Marzano Academies connects Design Area VIII to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and goals for both elementary and secondary classrooms. The central questions students will ask are does this situation provide me with a sense of belonging? Does this situation make me feel valued?

Those questions are practical, not theoretical. A student answers them every day through the accumulation of small experiences like how the teacher greets them, how peers respond to them, whether their interests ever appear in classroom examples, whether their effort is noticed, whether correction preserves their dignity, and whether they are invited to contribute in meaningful ways.

Research on school belonging supports the importance of these questions. Allen, Kern, Vella-Brodrick, Hattie, and Waters (2018) conducted a meta-analysis of school belonging and found that teacher support was one of the strongest predictors of school belonging across the studies they examined. Their review identified several themes that influence belonging, including teacher support, peer support, school safety, academic motivation, and race and ethnicity.

Recent work on teacher-student relationships reaches a similar conclusion. Emslander, Holzberger, Ofstad, Fischbach, and Scherer (2025) synthesized evidence across 26 meta-analyses involving approximately 2.64 million prekindergarten through grade 12 students. They found that teacher-student relationships are linked to multiple student outcomes, including academic achievement, motivation, well-being, belonging, engagement, behavior, and self-control.

That research reinforces an important point for educators: relationships are not soft additions to rigorous learning. They are part of the learning infrastructure. Students are more likely to take feedback seriously when they believe the teacher values them. They are more likely to persist when they feel they are not alone. They are more likely to participate when the classroom signals that their voice has a place.

This is especially important in competency-based classrooms. CBE asks students to work at different levels, monitor progress, seek feedback, revise work, advocate for support, and sometimes demonstrate learning in ways that feel unfamiliar. These actions require students to take risks. Students need to believe that the classroom is a place where those risks will be understood and not used against them. The Marzano Academies folio for Element VIIIa makes this point clearly: students want to know that the teacher has their best interests at heart and that if they try something new, their vulnerability will be protected.

Belonging and esteem are therefore not about lowering expectations. In many ways, they allow teachers to raise expectations responsibly. A student is more likely to accept challenge when challenge comes from someone who has also communicated care.

How: Belonging Is Built Through Repeated, Visible Actions

The four elements of Design Area VIII give teachers four ways to make belonging and esteem visible.

The first is through verbal and nonverbal behaviors that indicate affection. This does not require grand gestures. It often begins with the small daily signals such as greeting students at the door, using names, making eye contact, smiling, checking in after an absence, and showing interest in students beyond the immediate assignment.

The second element focuses on reluctant learners. This is essential because belonging is easiest to communicate to students who already respond positively to school. It is more difficult, and often more important, to communicate value and respect to students who appear disengaged and withdrawn from the learning community. Often this is visible through disruptive behaviors compounding the feeling by both the teacher and student that they do not belong. This is a powerful equity point because reluctant learners are often the students most likely to receive adult attention only when something goes wrong. Over time, they may come to associate teacher attention with correction or control. Demonstrating value and respect means intentionally creating a different pattern. The teacher still holds expectations, but the student also experiences interest, patience, dignity, and belief.

The third element is understanding students’ backgrounds and interests. Belonging is difficult to build in a generic classroom. Students need to see evidence that the teacher knows something about who they are. This includes interests, family context, language, culture, strengths, goals, concerns, learning preferences, and experiences outside of school.

This element aligns with recent research on culturally responsive teaching and belonging. Ialuna, Civitillo, and Jugert (2024) found that student-reported closeness in teacher-student relationships was positively related to school belongingness in ethnically diverse classrooms, and they concluded that teacher-student relationships are relevant to students’ sense of belonging.

The fourth element is providing opportunities for students to talk about themselves. This is closely related to understanding students’ backgrounds and interests, but it shifts the responsibility from teacher knowledge alone to student voice. The folio describes this element as powerful in its simplicity: when teachers structure opportunities for students to talk about themselves, students feel welcome and valued for their unique characteristics. These opportunities do not need to take large amounts of time or be large productions.

The key is choice and safety. Students should not be forced to disclose private experiences. Belonging is not built by making students perform vulnerability. It is built by giving them appropriate opportunities to be known, while allowing them to decide what and how much to share.

What: What It Looks Like When Belonging and Esteem Are Working

When Design Area VIII is working, the classroom feels personal without becoming intrusive. Students experience the teacher as someone who notices them, respects them, and wants them to succeed. For Element VIIIa, students respond positively to the teacher’s verbal and nonverbal interactions. They can describe the teacher as someone who cares for them. For Element VIIIb, students treat one another with respect and can say that the teacher cares for all students, not just the students who are easiest to teach. For Elements VIIIc and VIIId, students can describe the teacher as someone who knows them or is interested in them. They share information about personal interests, make connections between content and their lives, and describe the class as relevant to them personally.

These indicators matter because belonging and esteem cannot be judged only by teacher intent. They must be judged by student experience. A teacher might design an activity to build community, but the real question is whether students experience the activity as welcoming. This is consistent with the Marzano Academies emphasis on visible evidence. Teachers do not simply use a strategy and assume it worked. They look for evidence in student behavior, student explanation, and student response.

At the classroom level, belonging and esteem may show up in simple ways. More students participate without being called on. Students are more willing to ask questions. Peer conversations become more respectful. Reluctant learners begin to take small risks. Students refer to one another’s interests or strengths. A student who once avoided the teacher begins to ask for help. Students can explain not only what they are learning, but why the classroom feels like a place where they can learn.

At the school level, Design Area VIII connects to the larger context schools are trying to create. Belonging cannot depend on a single charismatic teacher or isolated classroom routine. If a school wants students to experience belonging and esteem consistently, it has to examine patterns across classrooms, advisory structures, extracurricular opportunities, adult-student relationships, peer culture, and the way students are recognized. Allen and colleagues’ 2022 systematic review found that successful school-based belonging interventions often targeted student strengths and promoted positive interactions among students and between students and school staff.

This matters because students do not experience school as a set of separate initiatives. They experience the cumulative effect of adult actions, peer interactions, routines, language, and opportunities to contribute. A student might feel valued in one classroom but invisible in another. A school committed to belonging and esteem has to ask: Where are students consistently known? Where are they consistently invited to contribute? Where do reluctant learners receive respect before correction? Where do students see their backgrounds, interests, and strengths reflected in the life of the school?

Bringing the Four Elements Together

Design Area VIII is not about being nice in a general way. It is about building a context in which students experience themselves as welcome and valued members of a learning community. This is especially important in a competency-based classroom. Students are asked to monitor their learning, respond to feedback, revise, persist, seek support, work with peers, and make decisions about their next steps. These behaviors are much more likely to develop in a classroom where students feel known and valued.

The teacher’s question, then, is not simply, “Do I care about my students?” Most teachers do. The stronger question is, “How do my students know they are welcome and valued here?” Sometimes the answer is a greeting. Sometimes it is a private conversation with a reluctant learner. Sometimes it is a lesson example connected to a student’s interest. Sometimes it is a structured opportunity for students to share something about themselves. Often, it is all of these actions repeated over time until students begin to experience the classroom differently.

To continue building your understanding of Design Area VII and the full Marzano Academies instructional model, become a member of the Learning Lab. For only $10 per month, Members can access Dr. Marzano’s research folios, professional learning resources, and practical tools designed to help teachers make competency-based practices work in real classrooms. The Learning Hub also includes Badging Experiences that allow teachers to identify a meaningful professional growth goal, strengthen their classroom routines, and document their growing expertise. Teachers should own their professional learning, and the Learning Hub is built to support that work. You can also sign up for Virtual Office Hours or engage in a CBE Coaching Series with Marzano Academies Faculty to deepen your team’s approach to a personalized, competency-based classroom. Please reach out with any questions.

References

Allen, K., Kern, M. L., Vella-Brodrick, D., Hattie, J., & Waters, L. (2018). What schools need to know about fostering school belonging: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 30(1), 1–34. doi:10.1007/s10648-016-9389-8

Allen, K.-A., Jamshidi, N., Berger, E., Reupert, A., Wurf, G., & May, F. (2022). Impact of school-based interventions for building school belonging in adolescence: A systematic review. Educational Psychology Review, 34(1), 229–257.

Emslander, V., Holzberger, D., Ofstad, S. B., Fischbach, A., & Scherer, R. (2025). Teacher-student relationships and student outcomes: A systematic second-order meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 151(3), 365–397. doi:10.1037/bul0000461

Ialuna, F., Civitillo, S., & Jugert, P. (2024). Culturally responsive teaching, teacher-student relationship and school belongingness: A multi-informant study in ethnically diverse classrooms. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 47, Article 100839. doi:10.1016/j.lcsi.2024.100839

Marzano, R. J. (2021a). Element VIIIa: Using verbal and nonverbal behaviors that indicate affection in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J. (2021b). Element VIIIb: Demonstrating value and respect for reluctant learners in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J. (2021c). Element VIIIc: Understanding students’ backgrounds and interests in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J. (2021d). Element VIIId: Providing opportunities for students to talk about themselves in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J., & Abbott, S. D. (2022). Teaching in a competency-based elementary school: The Marzano Academies model. Marzano Resources.

Marzano, R. J., Aschoff, A. S., & Avila, A. (2022). Teaching in a competency-based secondary school: The Marzano Academies model. Marzano Resources.

Marzano, R. J., Scott, D., Boogren, T. H., & Newcomb, M. L. (2017). Motivating and inspiring students: Strategies to awaken the learner. Marzano Resources.