9 Weeks to Build a Community in Health Education Class: What I’ve Learned and What I’m Still Figuring Out

I’m wearing a bracelet right now that says “GREEN BEANS” on it.

A group of students made it for me back when they were in seventh grade, the day they found out I was moving up to the high school. They handed it to me and said I had to wear it until they got there. The joke goes back years, to a quiz I give on the first day of class, where one of the questions is about my favorite food. The answer is not green beans. But somehow, somewhere along the way, the kids decided it was, and ever since, they have brought me green beans. Cans, jokes, drawings, and eventually, this bracelet.

I look down at that bracelet a lot, and it makes me think about what’s changed.

After 22+ years of teaching middle school health, where I had the same kids from fifth grade all the way through eighth, I’m now at the high school full-time. I love it. But the math is different. I see students for one nine-week quarter, and that’s it. No multi-year build. No inside jokes that compound across grades.

If you teach in a short-cycle model, you already know what I’m talking about. The kid who finally opens up in week eight is also the kid I’m losing in week nine. The community we built is the community I have to dissolve and rebuild again, and again, and again, four times a year.

So here is the truth I want to share: I am still figuring this out. I had a system that worked beautifully across four years per kid, and now I’m rebuilding it for a window that is one-tenth as long. Some of it is translating. Some of it isn’t. And I would genuinely love to hear from other teachers who are in the same boat.

Here is what I’ve learned in my first full year as a high school teacher.

Belonging is not the warm-up. It is the curriculum.

For a long time, a lot of us treated community building as the thing you did before the real teaching started. Get the names down, do an icebreaker or two, and then move on to the standards.

I don’t believe that anymore. Especially not in a nine-week class.

Stanford researcher Greg Walton has spent years studying what builds a sense of belonging in school. His team has found that brief interventions, delivered in an hour or less, can produce effects that last for years. The signals matter more than the time. What kids see, hear, and feel in the first few minutes of a new class shapes whether they think they belong in it.

This is everything for short-cycle teachers. We don’t have a year to slowly earn trust. We have a few days. The good news is, that might be enough. The catch is, you cannot waste them.

SHAPE America’s National Health Education Standards are built around skills like interpersonal communication, decision-making, and advocacy. None of those skills can be practiced by a kid who doesn’t feel safe enough to try, mess up, and try again. Belonging isn’t the soft thing we do before the standards. It is the condition that makes the standards possible.

So, I built my first weeks around that.

I go first.

For as long as I have been teaching, I have given my students a quiz on the first day of class. About me.

It started as a paper multiple-choice thing with my fifth and sixth graders. Then a Google Form. Then a Kahoot. Then a Blooket. Then a Quizizz. Then a Gimkit. During the pandemic, kids recorded their answers as videos on Flipgrid and built their own little video quizzes back at me. At the high school this past year, sometimes it was a simple Think-Pair-Share with a leaderboard for who knows me best, a low-key competition that the freshmen got more into than I expected.

The format is not the point. With my fifth graders it played like a Netflix comedy special. They thought everything was hilarious. By eighth grade the laughs were quieter, but the kids who were too cool for school were still laughing on the inside. I could see it.

The quiz is where kids learn I’m a sneakerhead. That one’s been a quiet gift. Kids who love shoes start walking into my classroom holding their foot up so I can see their kicks. Sometimes they’re heat. Sometimes they’re bricks. (If you know, you know.) Either way they get a fist bump, because the moment is not about the shoe. The moment is about a kid who decided I was someone they wanted to show their shoes to.

The quiz is not about the quiz. The quiz is me saying, out loud and on day one: I will be the first vulnerable person in this room. You don’t have to be. I am not telling them this is a safe space, I am showing them — by being the first one in the room to be a little weird.

Then I have them do a shorter version. Just a few questions about themselves. Nothing intense. But it sets up the trade. I went first. Now you go.

Here is what is harder at the high school. The fifth-grade laughter. The four-year payoff. The eighth grader walking into my room on day one already knowing me. Freshmen are protective. They are new to the building. They are figuring out who they are. They are not going to laugh out loud at my green bean joke the way a fifth grader will. Some of them will sit there stone-faced, and I have to trust that something is landing anyway.

Most of the time, it is.

The music is always on.

Day one matters, but the everyday stuff is what actually holds a class together over nine weeks.

The thing I do every single day, the thing I would not give up if you took everything else, is music. Music is playing when kids walk in. Music is playing when they walk out. It has been like this for years, and it creates these little moments I never plan for. A kid will hear something from my era and go, “Wait, what is this? I like this!” Or a kid will catch the first few seconds of the song they added and yell out, “That’s mine!” Those reactions are the whole thing.

The playlist is not mine. Well, some of it is mine. A bunch of it is mine. I am a 90s alternative kid and my students are going to learn what Beck sounds like whether they wanted to or not. But the rest is them. At the start of every grading period, every student fills out a Google Form and one of the questions is, “What song do you want to add to the class playlist?”

I add every single one. If it is appropriate for school, it goes on. The playlist now sits at around 400 songs and counting.

Here is what the research says.

Walton’s work tells us the signals matter more than the time. Kids decide whether they belong in a space based on cues, not on the calendar. Music educators have been making a related point for a while: When the music in a room reflects what kids actually live with, instead of only what the adult picks, it can strengthen their sense of belonging and cultural validation. The broader research on student voice lines up with that too. When kids’ input shows up in real decisions about the room, engagement and relationships tend to follow.

The playlist is the simplest student voice practice I have ever run. It costs me nothing. But every time a student’s song comes on, it tells them they are in the room, that I actually did the thing I said I would do. They asked me to add their song, and I did, and now here it is playing for everyone.

Even the kids who never said a word in class have come up at the end of the quarter and asked me to play their song one more time. Every quarter. Without fail.

The Skill Wall.

In the back corner of my classroom is a brick wall. It is not actually brick. It is brick-pattern wallpaper with the words THE SKILL WALL painted right across it. Above it, on the cinderblock, are the National Health Education Standards, posted big enough that you can read them from your seat.

When freshmen walk in on day one, the wall is not empty. It is already covered in faces. Friends, siblings, classmates, kids they know from down the hall. Dozens and dozens of small black-and-white selfie stickers, each one with a name and a skill written in marker. The message that wall sends a new kid is louder than anything I could say: People you know have stood here, broken through a skill, and put themselves on this wall. Now it is your turn.

Here is how it works. I have a cheap little camera from Amazon that prints small black-and-white sticker photos. When a student decides they have conquered a skill (and that part matters — when they decide, not me), they take a selfie with the camera, write their name and the skill they dominated on the sticker, and stick themselves to the wall. They are breaking through it. That is the metaphor I want my room to live inside. The skill is the wall. You break through.

The wall keeps growing. I do not clear it between quarters. I do not clear it between years. If I run out of brick, I will buy more brick.

The wall does a lot of work at once. It tells every kid who walks in what this class is about. It celebrates the skill, not the test score. It gives students agency over when they have actually got it. And it puts every new freshman in a room where their people are already on the wall, waiting for them to catch up.

In a nine-week class, I cannot afford to re-explain my philosophy every week. The wall does it for me.

The thing that actually worked.

This past summer at the Best Practices conference in Wisconsin, I saw a presentation by Kevin Mason, a fantastic health teacher and an expert in the workshop model, where students work independently or in small groups while the teacher confers with individuals. I borrowed one piece of it, and it changed my year.

I built an Analyzing Influences project I call the Life Cheat Code. It has six stations, with cones and instructions across the room. Kids move through them in order. One of the stations is a one-on-one conference with me.

The questions are simple. What is important to you? What are your biggest influences? Where do they come from? Most kids confuse influences with behaviors at first, and the conference is where we untangle that.

The stations teach the skill. The conference is where I actually meet the kid.

The single most common thing students told me about this year was their phones. They want to spend less time on them. They know it’s a problem. They want to stop. They just can’t. So, I started asking them, “What’s your TikTok algorithm? What kind of videos come up?”

And they would light up.

One student had a feed full of Ring camera videos of animals. Another was all sports cards, and I am also into sports cards, so we sat there and talked about cards for a while inside a curricular conference about influences. Another was makeup tutorials. Another was kids falling down stairs. And then there was the student whose whole feed was sneakers, just like mine, and once we figured that out we were off, trading favorites for the rest of the conference.

These were not soft conversations. They were Standard 2 in action. Analyzing Influences requires kids to look at what is shaping them. The algorithm is one of the biggest influences in their lives, and almost no other adult in the building is asking them about it with genuine curiosity. Parents try to police it. Teachers ignore it or scold it. I sat down across from them and asked them to walk me through it, and they let me in.

That was the unlock. In a nine-week class, I cannot build community across an entire room slowly. So, I am building it one conference at a time, inside the curriculum, where it counts twice. Once for the skill, and once for the relationship.

When I see those kids in the hallway now, we smile and say hi. Some of them will be in this building for four more years. I am betting that the conversation we had about their TikTok feed in week four of their freshman year is going to keep that hallway smile alive when they are seniors.

I hope so, anyway.

The honest part.

I have to be honest. I do not have this figured out, and there are a couple of things I am still wrestling with.

The quiet kid is one of them. In a year-long class, a student who is quiet in September has time to find their footing by April. In nine weeks, that same kid can disappear and I might not catch it in time. I have ideas. I am piloting some chatbot scaffolding so students who don’t raise their hand can still have a thinking partner. It is not a substitute for me noticing them. I am working on it.

The end of quarter is another one. We build something, and then I have to start over. Four times a year. I get to watch our connections form, dissolve, and form again. It is taxing in a way I did not expect. It is going to be even harder in a few years, with kids I did not get to teach somewhere between fifth and eighth grade, or kids like some of the ones I had this year, who I taught for five straight years.

I share all of this not to make this about my struggles, but because I think a lot of us are in this same spot. Short cycles, big classes, real kids, and no clear playbook. If we are all quietly working through this alone, none of us are going to figure it out fast enough.

So here is my ask.

If you teach in a short cycle, a quarter class, a six-week rotation, a one-semester block, anything where you don’t get the kids long enough to build the kind of community we all dream about, I want to hear from you.

What works? What doesn’t? What are you doing on day one that lands? What is the conference, the activity, the small ritual that turns nine weeks into something that lasts longer than nine weeks?

Find me. Email me. Post in SHAPE America’s Exchange community. Come find me at a conference. Let’s figure this out together.

A safe learning space where students feel connected and like they belong really is the foundation of a standards-based curriculum. I believe that more now than I did a year ago. I just think the foundation looks different when you only have nine weeks to lay it.

One more thing.

Come August, the kids who made me this bracelet will be freshmen. Many of them will walk into my classroom for their nine weeks of high school health. I will still be wearing the bracelet.

And on day one, in whatever format the quiz takes this year, I am going to do something I have not done in the 20 years of giving it.

For the first time, my answer to “What is Mr. Hagedorn’s favorite food?” is going to be green beans.

I think they’ll like that.

And I think it’s going to kick off a pretty great nine weeks.

Additional Resources

• The Workshop Model
• Improving Student Success Through Social Belonging

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