Featured Speakers:
- Rebeca Cerna, Senior Director, Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities, WestEd
- Krystal Wu, Program Manager, Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities, WestEd
- Dr. Theresa Pfister, Program Associate, Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities, WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 21st session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, Cultivating the Conditions for Learning and Well-Being.
Our featured speakers today are Rebeca Cerna, senior director of Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities at WestEd, Krystal Wu, program manager for our Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities team, and Dr. Theresa Pfister, program associate for our Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities team at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us.
My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host. Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a nonpartisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults.
Our staff partner with policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities and others, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices.
Now I’d like to pass the mic over to Rebeca. Rebeca, take it away.
Rebeca Cerna:
Thank you. Thank you, Danny. Hello, and again, welcome to our session on Cultivating the Conditions for Learning and Well-Being. We are thrilled that you are here joining us from across the country. Again, my name is Rebeca Cerna. I’m joining from California, and to this space, I bring my expertise of school climate and culture, community schools, and participatory data use approaches.
I’m joined by two fabulous colleagues, Krystal Wu, who brings expertise in social and emotional learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, and school climate and culture, and she’s joining us from Portland, the Portland, Oregon, area, and Theresa Pfister who brings expertise in evaluation and technical assistance, and also in social emotional learning, trauma-informed approaches, and educational equity, and she’s joining us from the Baltimore, Maryland, area.
So our team works in the spaces to enhance positive environments that foster connectedness, that promote health, well-being, and strengthen engagement. And today, what we’re gonna be doing during our short time here is we’re gonna be starting off with a quick activity, and then we’ll ground ourselves in what the conditions for learning and well-being are.
Then we’ll get to explore this whole idea of shifting the lens from an individual to a structural one. We will share some examples and practices to highlight what this looks like in action and in practice.
As part of our close, we’ll provide everyone with a Padlet full of resources for you to take back to apply this in your own local context.
So to truly cultivate conditions where learning and well-being flourish, it’s really essential to recognize that feeling safe, that feeling supported and connected isn’t just something that is a desired atmosphere. It’s foundational. We need to have it. We need to have those conditions in place for students and educators.
So when students and educators feel that they’re experiencing belonging, that they’re experiencing trust, they’re more open for authentic learning, for collaboration and for growth. But creating these conditions also requires us to really think about the perspective of where folks are coming from.
Creating these conditions is about us actively considering their perspectives, the experiences of everyone in our school community, and this perspective taking helps us create those welcoming environments where each person feels valued, that creates the way, that paves the way for deeper engagement and stronger relationships.
So to get us started, I’m gonna pass it to Theresa, who’s gonna kick off our activity.
Dr. Theresa Pfister:
Okay, so because our webinar today is all about changing perspectives, we are gonna try an exercise where we get to change our perspectives. Here’s how it’s going to go. First, you will be shown a zoomed-in image on the screen. As quickly as you can, you’re gonna go ahead and guess what it is and put your response in the chat.
Then I will zoom out, and you’ll get to see if you’re right, if you guessed the right object. Okay, so let’s go ahead and give it a try. This is our first image. It’s a picture of something that’s orange with a circular shape in the middle, sort of a starburst pattern. I already see answers in the chat. I see carrot, orange, sun, carrot, another orange, another carrot, another sun. Excellent. A flower. Carrot slice. Poppy flower. Ooh, specific with a poppy flower. Apricots. Oh, y’all are gonna make me hungry. All right. Flower. Orange. Okay, I’ll give you a couple more seconds. Put your answers in the chat, and then we’ll reveal.
Okay. Painting. Iris. Nebula. My husband’s a scientist. He would love that answer. All right, my friends. Here’s our answer. A lot of us got it right. This is a carrot. Let’s go ahead and jump to the next one. What is this? It looks to me like a cluster of kind of like thin stems or sticks. Kind of like black and white is the color. What’s your guess? Fur. Broom. Flower pistil. Brush. Tofu flower. Magnetic iron filaments. Oh, I love that one. Something in the ocean. I’ll give you a couple more seconds. Broom. Brush. Y’all are good at this game. All right, here’s the answer. A paintbrush. Good job. All right. Ooh, dog fur. I like that one.
Okay, last one. We’ll see if we can get it. What do you see? This is something that’s a little tan, yellowish brown. It’s got a raised pattern crisscrossing it. All right, melon rind. Cantaloupe. Mud. Cell water. Got scientists in the room. I love this. Net. Cell wall. Excellent. Yep, more cantaloupe. Honeydew. Love it. All right. All right, just a reveal. Y’all are on it today. This is a cantaloupe. Good job.
Thank you for playing this quick game as we’re getting started. So the question is, I mean, I love games, but why am I asking us to do this at the start of a webinar? Besides being fun, this little exercise reminds us of how easy it is to lose sight of the bigger picture when we are focused on just one small part.
In our everyday work, we’re often right up close dealing with the immediate needs of students, families, or staff, and when we’re that zoomed in, it’s natural to focus on what’s right in front of us, individual people, individual incidents, individual problems to solve. But when we step back, when we zoom out, we start to see the full landscape, the systems, the conditions, the patterns that shape what we see up close.
That shift in perspective helps us move from reacting to an individual situation to reimagining the structures that influence them in the first place. So thank you for playing that game with us and for practicing that shift. As we move forward, we’ll keep thinking about how we can see the bigger picture together and how that can help us design the conditions that support learning and well-being for everyone.
So to kind of ground us in what we’re going to be talking about in this shift, we pulled on four of the key conditions for learning and well-being. We focus on these four because of their unique and important contributions to the conditions children, youth, and adults need to learn and be well. As I’m reading through them, I’m gonna give us kind of a little summary and a little bit of research. I invite you to think about your own work, your own context, and if there are any recent challenges or situations that you’re facing that align with one or more of these components.
So the first one being fostering belonging and connection. Students learn best when they feel like they belong, when they see themselves as valued and integral to the learning community. Research from the Aspen Institute reminds us that belonging isn’t just about relationships. It’s about identity and participation. It’s about whether students see their cultures, voices, and strengths reflected in the life of the school. When we create the conditions for belonging, we create the foundation for engagement, motivation, and academic success.
The second is supporting well-being. As Rebeca said, emotional, social, and mental health aren’t nice to have. They are prerequisites for sustained learning and cognitive growth. The Learning Policy Institute’s recent work underscores that well-being and learning are deeply intertwined. Students can’t engage in rigorous thinking if they don’t first feel centered, safe, and supported, which leads us to our third, preventing and responding to harm.
Safety, physical, emotional, and relational, is the baseline for learning. When students feel unsafe or threatened or even re-traumatized, their brains are in survival mode. That means they’re not able to access learning mode. Research led by Brissett and colleagues reminds us that preventing and repairing harm isn’t only about discipline. It’s about cultivating trust and care across the whole community.
And this final one, as an evaluator, I’m a big fan of this one. So to know whether our efforts around belonging, well-being, and harm prevention and repairing harm are working, we have to look closely at how our systems are actually functioning. As Wayne and colleagues point out in their work, improvement depends on learning from evidence about both what’s changing and what is staying the same or in the way.
That means gathering meaningful data, listening to the experiences of students and staff, and being willing to adapt. Evaluation isn’t just a compliance exercise. It’s about curiosity and growth so we can build the conditions that truly support thriving for everyone.
So thank you for listening to my little mini lecture. So now that we have an idea about these four key conditions for learning and well-being, I’m going to pass it to Krystal to talk about that shifting of perspective.
Krystal Wu:
Thanks, Theresa. So when we talk about belonging, safety, and well-being, it can be easy to think about what we as individuals need to do differently, but lasting change happens when we can zoom out, right, per that perspective taking exercise you all just engaged in, and really look at the wider picture and at the conditions shaping those experiences.
And looking at those conditions is what we call taking a structural lens, and this is inspired by a great chapter on structural ideology in the book by Paul Gorski and Katy Swalwell called “Fix Injustice, Not Kids”. We’ll make sure to get a link to that in the chat. It’s a wonderful chapter.
So when we’re talking about this shift from an individual to a structural lens, we’re really thinking about zooming out to see the systems, the policies, the cultural and environmental forces that influence what’s possible for students, staff, and families. So instead of asking what’s wrong with the student or family or colleague, we would start asking what’s happening around this person or people that’s getting in the way of their success.
And when we focus on individuals in particular, and we don’t do that zooming out, we run the risk of reinforcing deficit narratives, right, or seeing students, families, or educators as the problem alone rather than seeing the inequitable systems that constrain them. So structural lens then really can help us uncover the root causes that shape who gets access to opportunity, belonging, and support, and how a focus on systems can help us build these collective conditions such as policies, practices, relationships, and resource flows that make thriving possible for every learner.
So what does it look like to practice making this shift? What are some of the questions that we can ask ourselves as education leaders? Here are some reflective questions that we might encourage you to ask yourself. You could bring these to a team meeting. You can use them by yourself in your journaling, or you could pause and reflect after a contentious situation. You might here think about, Theresa asked you on the last slide to consider which of those areas or those conditions for belonging and well-being you had in mind, and so you might bring that challenge to mind right now as I read these questions.
So here are these reflective questions that might be supportive for you. What are the root causes? How might inequity be operating here? What conditions are shaping this outcome? How might we rethink those conditions to facilitate different results? What barriers exist and what can we do differently to remove them?
And we just really wanna invite you that when we look at challenges through a structural lens, what we are reminded is that people aren’t broken. Systems are. And then our role as leaders is to notice the patterns and name the conditions, and then work together to change them so that learning and well-being can actually take root.
So the next series of slides, and we invite your questions and comments in the chat, feel free to keep ’em coming, is Theresa and I are gonna run through each of those conditions that she named and kind of talk through what might a shift from an individual to a structural lens look like, and then what are some examples from schools, districts, and other organizations that we’ve worked with or heard of.
So, okay, for belonging and connection, an education leader might, who’s taking an individual lens, might say something like, “I support students and families however I can as they learn how to adapt to our community.” And we just wanna say that supporting individual students and families is important and shows care. It’s not that that’s bad, but if we notice that we’re offering the same kinds of supports over and over or that we’re always asking students and families to adapt to us rather than the other way around, that might be a sign that we need to look deeper.
So a leader taking a structural lens might ask what’s in our systems, our policies, our practices, our everyday routines and rituals that might be creating barriers to belonging, and how can we redesign those so that everyone feels like they’re truly part of the community? So it’s just making that shift again to the structural.
So what does this look like in practice? We have a couple examples. So at the school level, a district in Michigan that we’ve connected with supports ninth graders as they transition to high school through what they call a Freshman Academy. This program prioritizes relationships and addresses academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs, and they also have a staff person, so an SEL wellness coordinator, who focuses specifically on supporting students through that critical first year.
As a different example, at a regional level, a county office of education in California created healing-centered professional learning spaces for Black and African American-identifying employees after their data showed that half of their long-tenured staff did not feel a sense of inclusion or belonging. So they ended up creating these racial affinity spaces that provided room for connection, mutual support, and collective well-being.
So both of those examples show that belonging isn’t something we can expect to just happen. It’s something we design for by examining and reimagining the conditions that help people feel seen, valued, and connected.
Dr. Theresa Pfister:
Okay, so the next component is supporting well-being. So an education leader taking an individual lens about well-being might say something like, “The best way to help students is to consider their individual needs and stories.” This is important, and this is not bad. We wanna make that really clear. Knowing our students and what makes them them is critical to building relationships and providing the support they need to be well, but if we only focus on the individual, as Krystal was saying, we might miss bigger forces at play.
So with a structural lens, a leader might say, “I closely monitor patterns and trends as I consider each student’s contextualized individual experiences.” So this is really drawing on context and how important context is. So examples of folks that we’ve worked with. So when conducting student listening circles at a school district in California, K through 8 school leaders learned that their middle schoolers were leaving lunch hungry. One student told them that they were getting the same portion sizes as the first graders but their needs were different.
Rather than just making sure that one student had more snacks, they made changes to the school lunch, adjusting lunch portions so middle schoolers received the right amount of calories for their growing bodies. In this second example, there’s an elementary school in Washington D.C. that noticed that there was a pattern of teachers and staff burning out. Rather than just saying, “Hey, that’s how it is,” they developed school community partnership that provided mental health supports for the adults in the school.
Both of these examples not only show care for the individual’s well-being but change policies and practices to support collective well-being.
Krystal Wu:
So when we talk about preventing and repairing harm that happens in schools, and this could be for if there are any folks in the room who practice restorative practices or are part of the restorative practices implementation team at your site, we know that leaders often focus on individual actions and take care of incidents as they arise with consequences for people who cause harm, and that’s an important part of the job. That kind of responsiveness really matters, right? We need it, but many of us are also learning that to create safer, more connected environments, we need to understand what’s happening around people, so the conditions, routines and systems that shape their experiences and enable the harm to occur in the first place.
So it’s thinking about root causes and how to get at that to change those so that the harm doesn’t continue to happen. So a couple examples here. At this middle school in Illinois, leaders were noticing and observing that Black boys were being suspended at much higher rates than their peers. And so to understand this problem, they conducted empathy interviews with students to understand how the everyday interactions were landing differently for different students.
They wanted to understand what is it about the classroom environment that is having teachers send you out at these disproportionate rates. And what these insights ended up doing is they helped teachers see how power and bias and the way that they were, the tone of voice they were using with students actually was showing up and impacting the students’ behavior, and it opened up new conversations kind of intergenerationally about respect and belonging.
And then at a STEM magnet school in Connecticut, staff and students shared that passing periods felt unsafe and chaotic, and instead of imposing a top-down fix where this principal and their team just decided what would happen, they decided to do what Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan would call collecting “street data”, and I’ll put a link to that in the chat, which is conducting informal conversations and observations about what students were actually experiencing.
And so together, students and leaders actually came up with some practical changes to hallway supervision and transitions that made the space calmer and safer for everyone. What’s important about both of these stories is that they didn’t start with a policy change from top down. They started with curiosity and partnership and really asking for student and community member perspectives.
By looking closely at the conditions that were shaping the behavior that came about and involving the people most impacted, these schools were able to create meaningful, more sustainable improvements to support safety and connection overall.
Dr. Theresa Pfister:
And the final one is on evaluating practice. So an education leader taking an individual lens might say something like, “I have an open-door policy and get frustrated when students or staff don’t report their negative experiences.” Open-door policies are really important, but rather than blaming individuals who don’t feel comfortable, safe, or empowered enough to walk through those doors, we have to think about what we can change big picture so their stories are still getting told.
A leader taking a structural lens might say, “I proactively seek critical feedback by providing different avenues for community members to offer feedback. I don’t presume that just because I haven’t heard about an issue doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” So in practice, we’ve got two examples of using evaluation.
In an effort to address equity in discipline, a community school district conducted some data analysis. In this analysis, they found a pretty profound racial disproportionality in their practices. To address this at the structural level, they sought out training in cultural proficiency and restorative practices.
In the second example, to support the statewide evaluation of the Behavioral Health Student Services Act, WestEd has convened a Youth Advisory Group where young people across California are sharing their experiences and ideas about how the youth mental health services funded in their communities are changing things for them. Their insights will impact future policies, practices, and funding opportunities. In both of these examples, data were collected and analyzed and then used to strengthen and improve their approaches to discipline and mental health on a structural level.
Krystal Wu:
Okay, so we know we just did a lot of talking at you, but we would love to hear what’s resonating in particular. And so we know that shifting perspective starts with curiosity. And so we’d love to hear from you. So we invite you to return to the conditions for learning and well-being that we described. So that’s fostering belonging and connection, supporting well-being, preventing and repairing harm, and evaluating practice.
Which of these conditions would most benefit from a shift to a structural lens in your community? We would love to hear from you. So go ahead and feel free to respond in the poll. Which of these would most benefit from a shift to a structural lens in your community? Okay, let’s close the poll and see where we land.
Thank you. I’m not sure if you all can see the results, but about 50% of us said fostering belonging and connection. A few of us said supporting well-being. 20% said preventing and repairing harm, and 35% said evaluating practice. So we’re just scattered all over the place, but I would say majority in fostering belonging and connection and in evaluating practice. Thank you all so much for participating.
Rebeca Cerna:
So as we close, I know the time goes by so fast. As we close, we invite you to keep the condition you selected in mind, the one that feels most relevant to your context, and we’d love for you to explore the resource Padlet. So you can either hold your camera from your phone to go to the QR code, and also Danny put it in the chat, and you could just access it through the link.
So in the Padlet, you’ll find sample tools, stories, and examples from other districts and schools that are already making that shift in thinking about the conditions from a structural lens, and we invite you to take a look at those resources. Our hope is that something here helps you make one next step or to share something with another colleague about creating the conditions where all young people and the adults who serve them can truly thrive.
And with that, I’ll pass it to Danny.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, Rebeca, Krystal and Theresa, for a great session today, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. Feel free to reach out to Rebeca and Theresa via email if you have any questions about the work we discussed today.
You can reach out to Rebeca at [email protected] and Theresa at [email protected]. For those of you interested in learning more about our school climate work at WestEd in general, email us at schoolclimate, one word, @WestEd.org. And you can check out recordings of our past Leading Together webinars.
We’ve covered a range of topics including literacy, assessment, special education, and mathematics, and we’re working on a couple more in December as well as our schedule for 2026, so look out for future dates. To access our Leading Together webinar series recordings, visit us online at WestEd.org/leading-together-2025.
And finally, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at WestEd.org/subscribe or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. We’ll see you next time.