Belonging is one of the most talked-about—and most misunderstood—ideas in education.
We often treat it like a feeling that students either bring with them or don’t. If students feel disconnected, we respond with posters, slogans, or one-off activities meant to “build relationships.”
Those things aren’t bad. But they’re not enough.
Here’s the shift that matters:
Belonging isn’t a feeling problem. It’s a design problem.
What the Science of Learning and Development Tells Us
Research on the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) shows that belonging is deeply linked to learning. Students are more likely to engage, persist, and take academic risks when they feel safe, seen, and valued.
But belonging doesn’t magically appear.
It’s shaped by instructional choices:
Who gets to speak—and how often
Who gets choice and agency
Whose knowledge and experiences are treated as valuable
How mistakes are responded to
Whether feedback invites growth or signals judgment
In other words, belonging lives inside the work itself.
Why Posters Aren’t Enough
A classroom can say “You belong here” on the wall and still send the opposite message through its design.
If tasks are rigid, voices are limited, and thinking is narrowly defined, students quickly learn where they stand.
Belonging isn’t something we add after instruction.
We build it into it.
Designing for Belonging
Designing for belonging doesn’t mean lowering expectations. It means creating structures that invite students to participate meaningfully.
That can look like:
Tasks with multiple entry points
Opportunities for students to connect learning to their experiences
Structured collaboration where every voice has a role
Feedback that focuses on growth instead of compliance
When belonging is intentional, students are more willing to engage deeply—and learning becomes more durable.
A Coaching Note from the Field
When teachers ask how to “build better relationships,” I often start with lesson design.
Relationships grow when students feel their thinking matters.
Belonging isn’t an add-on.
It’s an instructional choice.
If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing schools that actually work.
For years, we’ve treated engagement like something teachers should be able to manufacture on demand.
If students aren’t engaged, the assumption is often that the lesson wasn’t exciting enough, interactive enough, or energetic enough. So we add activities. We add movement. We add tools. We add noise.
And then we’re surprised when it still doesn’t work.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve learned as an instructional coach:
Engagement isn’t something you plan for. It’s something you earn.
Why Planning for Engagement Often Backfires
When engagement becomes the primary goal of lesson planning, we usually end up designing around surface-level behaviors:
Are students busy?
Are they moving?
Are they talking?
Are they smiling?
But none of those things guarantees learning.
In fact, classrooms can look highly engaged while very little meaningful thinking is happening. Students comply. They complete. They perform school.
And teachers feel frustrated because they did everything “right.”
What the Research Actually Tells Us
Research connected to the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) consistently points to the same conclusion:
Engagement follows meaning.
Students are more likely to engage when:
The task feels relevant to their lives or the world around them
They have some sense of ownership or choice
The thinking required actually matters
When those conditions are present, engagement emerges naturally. When they’re missing, no amount of energy can save the lesson.
This is why gimmicks don’t scale—and why they exhaust teachers.
Shifting the Planning Question
Instead of starting with:
“How do I make this engaging?”
Try starting with:
“Why would this matter to a student?”
That single question forces a different kind of design thinking:
What problem is being explored?
What decisions are students being asked to make?
Who or what is this work for?
Where does student thinking actually show up?
When lessons are built around those questions, engagement becomes a byproduct—not a burden.
What This Means for Teachers
This shift doesn’t require abandoning structure, rigor, or content. It requires recentering the work on meaningful thinking rather than performance.
It also reduces burnout.
When students carry more cognitive load, teachers don’t have to bring all the energy. The work itself does more of the heavy lifting.
That’s not about doing less—it’s about doing different.
A Coaching Note from the Field
When teachers tell me, “My students just aren’t engaged,” my response is rarely about strategies.
It’s usually about the task.
Fix the task, and engagement often surprises you.
If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing school in ways that actually work.
No spam. No gimmicks. Just clear thinking from the field.
Illustrative Math’s CEO on What Went Wrong in NYC and Why Pre-K Math is Up Next – Illustrative Mathematics created a K-12 math curriculum used in many U.S. schools, but its rollout in New York City faced challenges due to implementation issues. The curriculum encourages students to think about problems before teachers explain solutions, blending direct teaching with student exploration. The organization is now focusing on early math by developing a pre-K curriculum to help students succeed from the start.
Mark Rober’s underwater search for a flooded Gold Rush mining town – (This is so FREAKING cool) Mark Rober used sonar and a small submarine to search for a flooded Gold Rush town under Folsom Lake in California. The town was covered by water after a dam was built in 1955. Despite challenges, the team found interesting shapes and objects on the lakebed.
D’Angelo: 14 Essential Songs – D’Angelo was a talented soul singer, songwriter, and producer known for his unique style and deep musicianship. He released three important albums blending soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop, influencing the neo-soul movement. Despite personal struggles, his music remains powerful and full of emotion, exploring love, pain, and social issues.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
I’ve been on a zine kick for a while now, and recently had the chance to walk teachers through making their first zine.
We worked on creating their own zines, which was fun and made many of them uncomfortable, which is perfectly OK. I compiled some quick links and information, and we discussed potential ideas they might consider and run with when working with students.
Oh, and here’s the zine I made during one of the sessions. Feel free to use it to introduce the idea of zines to your peers and admin.
A zine (short for “magazine” or “fanzine”) is a small-circulation, self-published work, often made by hand, that can take many forms—comics, essays, art, collages, instructions, etc.
Because zines are informal, tactile, and often DIY, they offer a low-stakes way for students to share voice, experiment with layout or narrative, and synthesize content in creative formats.
Zines are used in classrooms to teach skills such as media literacy, personal narrative, research synthesis, visual thinking, and more.
A friend made this prayer into a short video and, while the focus is on the work of Christians (real Christians, not the power-mad Christian Nationalists currently trying to ruin literally everything in the world), I can’t help but see our work as educators reflected here, as well.
This prayer was first presented by Cardinal Dearden in 1979 and quoted by Pope Francis in 2015. This reflection is an excerpt from a homily written for Cardinal Dearden by then-Fr. Ken Untener on the occasion of the Mass for Deceased Priests, October 25, 1979. Pope Francis quoted Cardinal Dearden in his remarks to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2015. Fr. Untener was named bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, in 1980.
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
More students (and teachers) should grasp this concept. School is a great thing, to be sure, but so is learning on your own. If we can bring that type of learning into our schools… oh, what a time we could have.
But it’s like Jim Henson said: “Your kids… don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
One of the things we’ve tried hard to do in our house is to make it a place of learning while also making it as unlike school as possible. What this shakes out to, essentially, is thinking about the house as a library.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
We’re two weeks into the school year, and I’ve already seen some incredible examples of authentic learning in action. It’s a good reminder of Steve Wozniak’s advice: keep the main thing the main thing—and don’t sell out for something that only looks better.
This week’s newsletter rounds up 10 links worth your time, from AI and education to remote learning, punk archives, and why cell phone bans never work.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
The dominant story about COVID-era school closures has been simple: remote learning hurt kids’ mental health. And for many, that’s true. National data show American teens reported more loneliness and more suicidal thoughts between 2019 and 2023, with isolation during lockdown often cited as the culprit.
But a new study complicates that narrative. Researchers analyzed survey data from more than 6,000 middle schoolers during the 2020–21 school year and found a striking divide:
White and higher-income students were significantly happier and less stressed when attending school in person.
Black, Latino, and low-income students often reported the opposite—feeling less stressed and sometimes even happier when learning remotely.
In other words, remote school wasn’t universally worse. For some groups, it offered a reprieve from stressful in-person school environments, from health risks during the pandemic, or from inequities baked into the classroom experience.
The findings don’t suggest remote school is “better” overall. Academic setbacks during closures were real and disproportionately hurt the very students who sometimes felt mentally healthier at home. Instead, the study is a reminder that school isn’t a neutral space. How students experience it depends deeply on race, income, and environment.
As the researchers note, it’s not enough to flatten the pandemic into a single story of harm. Different groups of students experienced it differently—and will need different supports moving forward. If schools want to be places where all kids can thrive, they’ll need to reckon with why in-person learning left some students more stressed than staying home.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
David Wiley is experimenting with what he calls “generative textbooks” — a mashup of OER (open educational resources) and generative AI. His core idea is:
What if anyone who can create an open textbook could also create an AI-powered, interactive learning tool without writing code?
From Open Content to Open AI-Driven Learning
For decades, Wiley has championed open education resources (OER)—teaching and learning materials freely available to adapt and share under open licenses like Creative Commons. With generative AI now in the mix, Wiley sees a unique opportunity to merge the participatory spirit of OER with the dynamic adaptability of language models.
The result? A new kind of learning tool that feels less like a dusty PDF and more like a responsive learning app—crafted by educators, powered by AI, and free for students to use.
The Anatomy of a Generative Textbook
Wiley’s prototype isn’t just a fancy textbook—it’s a modular, no-code authoring system for AI-powered learning. Here’s how it works:
Learning Objectives: Short, focused statements about what learners should master.
Topic Summaries: Context-rich summaries intended for the AI—not students—to ground the model’s responses in accuracy.
Activities: Learning interactions like flashcards, quizzes, or explanations.
Book-Level Prompt Stub: A template that sets tone, personality, response format (e.g., Markdown), and overall voice.
To build a generative textbook with ten chapters, an author creates:
One book-level prompt stub
Ten learning objectives (one per chapter)
Ten concise topic summaries
Various activity templates aligned with each chapter
A student then picks a topic and an activity. The system stitches together the right bits into a prompt and feeds it to a language model—generating a live, tailored learning activity.
Open Source, Open Models, Open Access
True to his roots, Wiley made the tool open source and prioritized support for open-weight models—AI models whose architectures and weights are freely available. His prototype initially sent prompts to a model hosted via the Groq API, making it easy to swap in different open models—or even ones students host locally.
Yet here’s the catch: even open models cost money to operate via API. And according to Wiley, most educators he consulted were less concerned with “open” and more with “free for students.”
A Clever—and Simple—Solution
Wiley’s creative workaround: instead of pushing the AI prompt through the API, the tool now simply copies the student’s prompt to their clipboard and directs them to whatever AI interface they prefer (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, a school-supported model). Students just paste and run it themselves.
There’s elegance in that simplicity:
No cost per token—students use models they already have access to.
Quality-first—they can choose the best proprietary models, not just open ones.
Flexibility—works with institution-licensed models or free-tier access.
Of course, there are trade-offs:
The experience feels disjointed (copy/paste instead of seamless).
Analytics and usage data are much harder to capture.
Learners’ privacy depends on the model they pick—schools and developers can’t guarantee it.
A Prototype, Not a Finished Product
Wiley is clear: this is a tech demonstration, not a polished learning platform. The real magic comes from well-crafted inputs—clear objectives, accurate summaries, and effective activities. Garbage in, garbage out, especially with generative AI.
As it stands, generative textbooks aren’t ready to replace traditional textbooks—but they can serve as innovative supplements, offering dynamic learning experiences beyond static content.
The Bigger Picture: Where OER Meets GenAI
Wiley’s vision reflects a deeper shift in education: blending open pedagogy with responsive AI-driven learning. It’s not just about access; it’s about giving educators and learners the ability to co-create, remix, and personalize knowledge in real time.
Broader research echoes this trend: scholars explore how generative AI can support the co-creation, updating, and customizing of learning materials while urging care around authenticity and synthesis.
Related Innovations in Open AI for Education
VTutor: An open-source SDK that brings animated AI agents to life with real-time feedback and expressive avatars—promising deeper human-AI interaction.
AI-University (AI‑U): A framework that fine-tunes open-source LLMs using lecture videos, notes, and textbooks, offering tailored course alignment and traceable output to learning materials.
GAIDE: A toolkit that empowers educators to use generative AI for curriculum development, grounded in pedagogical theory and aimed at improving content quality and educator efficiency.
Final Thoughts
David Wiley’s generative textbooks project is less about launching a product and more about launching possibilities. It’s a thought experiment turned demonstration: what if creating powerful, AI-powered learning experiences were as easy as drafting a few sentences?
In this vision:
Educators become prompt architects.
Students become active participants, selecting how they engage.
Learning becomes dynamic, authorable, and—critically—free to access.
That’s the open promise of generative textbooks. It may be rough around the edges now, but the implication is bold: a future where learning tools evolve with educators and learners—rather than being fixed in print.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.
