There is no Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for belonging. No assessment rubric, no term plan and no moderation file. Yet it is the subject I spend the most time teaching and the one I want fellow educators to consider teaching too.
It is fulfilling to know you have done your utmost to ensure that your learners belong in your classroom.
It starts with a name. I make it my business to pronounce every child's name correctly and to call them by the name they prefer, not the version that is easier for me. I ask them what their name means.
I remember a learner who had spent years being called by a nickname. When I asked her what her full name was and what the name meant, she lit up and told the class the story behind it. It took two minutes to build the connection.
Regarding greetings, I understand that a greeting means "I see you". As an adult, I do not always wait for learners to greet me; when I see them, I initiate a greeting.
I endeavour to treat every child as though they are the only one in the room. Not because the other 39 do not matter but because each of them needs to feel, at least once in the lesson, that they are not a statistic in a class list.
Individuality is not a classroom management problem to be smoothed over.
Learners have different fingerprints for a reason and a classroom that tries to sand everyone down to the same shape is not creating order; it is erasing people.
Every fortnight, my learners sit next to someone new. It is a deliberate refusal to let friendship groups calcify into the only social world a child knows for a year.
Sometimes I hand that choice back to them. I let them sit with whoever they want. Giving a child authority over something as small as where they sit is giving them agency.
For the learners who do not put their hands up, who won't tell you in front of the class that they're struggling, I borrow a version of James Nottingham's "Learning Pit" and ask: "Where are you in the pit today? Are you at the bottom, on the way down or climbing out?"
It gives an introverted child a way to tell me something true without having to perform it publicly and it gives me a way to check in without cornering them.
When a child leaves my lesson early for a sports match or a cultural event, I do not treat it as an interruption to my subject. I wish them the best because I know a child's development does not stop at the classroom door.
At the start of the year, I ask my learners what an ideal teacher and lesson look like. Then I try to build towards the picture. I also ask them to evaluate me. What should I start doing? What should I stop? What should I keep doing?
If a child tells me that they dislike my subject, I do not file that under "difficult learner". I file it under feedback and I go back and tweak my practice.
I teach and assess differently for different needs because uniformity is not the same thing as fairness.
I let them work outdoors sometimes, so they get sunlight and fresh air because I refuse to pretend that a child's ability to think is separate from a child's body. My discipline is restorative, not punitive, because to err is human.
I have, without meaning to, offended a child before. What matters is what happens afterwards: I go back to that child, name what went wrong and repair it in a way they can see. It is that visible repair, not the absence of mistakes, that teaches a child they belong in my room.
When a child does not shine in my subject but shines elsewhere — on the field, on a stage, in another classroom — I notice and I say so.
It costs a teacher nothing to acknowledge a child's brilliance outside our own subject. It can cost a child everything to have that brilliance go unmentioned by every adult who sees them through only one lens.
None of these are grand interventions. None of them will show up on a school's academic results sheet. But taken together, they are how I teach the subject that has no textbook: that this room, my classroom, is a place of wonder and belonging.
Learners feel seen.
I am not describing an exceptional pedagogy. I am describing attention.
You have everything you need to start. Learn one name properly tomorrow. Ask one child where they are in the pit. Notice one child's brilliance outside your subject and say it out loud.
Do that consistently and you will find, as I have, that you are teaching the subject that matters most — the one with no syllabus and no ceiling on what it can do for a child.
Cebolakhe Zondo is a teacher, head of department, researcher, keynote speaker and PhD candidate at Wits.