Turning classrooms into communities: Addressing student loneliness

By Gamelle Fitzgibbon (she/her), teacher, North Vancouver

The sounds that greet the start of the school day have changed dramatically over the 15 years I’ve been teaching. The morning start used to be filled with students chatting or doing dances and silly things. Now… now, sometimes it’s a strange sort of silence in a room full of students with heads down, looking at their phones.

When my class starts, I try to interrupt that silence on purpose. As a high school Spanish teacher, I also see my work as relational. I believe one of our responsibilities as teachers, especially in these times, is to help students connect with one another, accept and celebrate differences, and, ideally, make friends through the environments we create.

Research supports my instinct. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education’s longitudinal Making Caring Common Project found that the strongest predictor of health and happiness is the quality of our relationships. (1) Not income. Not even exercise. Relationships. The study, conducted from 2020 to 2024, also revealed that loneliness was widespread even before the pandemic and has only gotten worse. Community, then, is not an optional add-on in our classrooms. It is medicine.

... communities built on service foster belonging. Contribution creates investment. When students are invited to participate in sustaining the classroom, they feel needed.

The challenge, of course, is practical. How do we as teachers create community amid packed curricula and ever-growing to-do lists?

The Making Caring Common framework emphasizes fostering cultures that care for and serve others. While the research speaks broadly, I believe classroom culture is where this work becomes tangible. This year, I am teaching four Grade 8 classes in their first year of high school. Despite a full-day Grade 8 retreat, orientation activities, and significant staff support, many students arrived struggling to make friends or find their place. Now several months in, even some of my most gregarious students have confided that they are finding it tricky to make new connections. They don’t know where to start.

With that challenge in mind, I work to make my classroom environment a place to make friends as well as learn. Here are a few simple, intentional ways I work to reduce loneliness and spark connection in my classroom.

Create rituals and routines that centre students as people

Rituals give students something predictable to belong to. In my classroom, we cook together at the end of each unit. We begin every class with a palabra del día where we reinforce names and applaud great accents. We do a visual emotional check-in that practices grammar while giving students language for how they are feeling. These routines help students see one another and be seen. The key is creating organic ways of seeing each other as unique people worth knowing.

Pair routine with low-pressure self-expression

Music. Movement. Shared art projects. While I teach a language, there are many ways to do so, and I’ve found that an abundance of play-based learning helps students lower their guard and get to see other sides of their classmates. For example, during a unit on Mexico’s botas picudas, students design their own shoes as a way to express identity without a vulnerability overload. We share work in a celebratory, non-evaluative way, and I give them chances to talk to one another about their projects. I look for ways to have students talk to each other that are casual and filled with opportunities to get to know the quirks of one another. Expression, when you keep it low stakes, can open doors to students sharing more and making natural connections.

Actively facilitate connections

I sometimes think of myself as the host of a dinner party full of strangers. “Have you met Andrés? He plays soccer too!” Because I take time to get to know my students, I can casually connect them during class based on what I know they have in common. I also try to create opportunities for people to share about themselves, either through storytelling or through games. If we are talking about favourite restaurants and two students both love the same restaurant, I name it. These small moments model how connection happens and give students permission to reach out to one other with a built-in starter.

Switch up the seating often

I change the seating in my classroom regularly, about every two months, moving between rows, table groups, pairs, and a large U-shape. These shifts gently disrupt fixed groupings and reduce the social risk of sitting somewhere new. When seating changes are normalized, students gain a low-pressure way to sit beside someone different, opening the door to new connections without awkwardness. For example, after a seating change this fall, two students who had barely spoken to one another ended up paired for daily warm-ups and gradually began arriving to class together.

Create roles that invite contribution

Perhaps most importantly, I assign roles in my classroom daily. Students help collect materials, support classroom routines, and assist one another. The Making Caring Common study highlights that communities built on service foster belonging. Contribution creates investment. When students are invited to participate in sustaining the classroom, they feel needed. Stewardship builds a strong sense of belonging. I have two Grade 8 girls that do attendance every day in one of my classes, and they said it’s the highlight of their day. Attendance—who knew?!

One of the clearest affirmations of this approach arrived in my inbox just before winter break. A Grade 8 student, who had been resistant and argumentative in class, had struggled all term to connect with peers. Slowly, from September to December, I implemented the strategies above, never forcing interaction but consistently inviting connection through ritual, play, and shared responsibility.

The email subject line read: “Jason Meeting Luna.” The message itself contained only a photo: another quiet student from my class sitting on the floor of the sender’s house, meeting his dog. I smiled for the rest of the day.

Loneliness is not always loud. Often, it sits silently in our classrooms. When we design learning spaces that prioritize connection, we do more than teach curriculum. We help students find one another.

Inspiration credit to the online Community Leadership Masterclass with Radha Agrawal I took in November 2025.

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 1 M. Batanova, R. Weissbourd, J. McIntyre, “Loneliness In America: Just the Tip of the Iceberg?”, Making Caring Common Project, The President and Fellows of Harvard College, October 2024: mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america-2024