A diverse learning community puts us in daily contact with others unlike ourselves.
Different backgrounds. Different experiences. Different strengths. Different assumptions. Different ways of seeing the world.
Our young people are heading into a world that will ask them to communicate and collaborate across culture, class, identity, experience, expertise, belief, and perspective. School should give them practice doing that now.
Diversity is hard.
“Rigor” is a buzzword in education, and it usually refers to how challenging it is to absorb information and share it back. Is community rigorous? It sure is hard. We believe that the opportunity and expectation to develop interpersonal skills across difference should be a hallmark of a rigorous education.
It is at LightHouse. We are a competency-based program. Empathy, Effective Communication, and Collaboration are all foundational graduation requirements here.
Communication comes easily when everyone shares the same references, expectations, and language. Understanding someone whose experience differs from yours takes effort, and that effort is where the learning happens.
When people with different assumptions spend their days together, they misread one another, disagree, and sometimes hurt each other’s feelings. Even in relationships without significant differences, conflict is part of life. We think it’s essential for young people to learn how to hold and communicate their feelings with respect and care, and to learn how to listen and appreciate the perspective of others.
Carlos “Rec” McBride leads that work as our Director of Restorative Culture and Belonging. Rec brings more than 15 years of experience in education, community work, and creative media, including teaching at Hampshire College, Smith College, Holyoke Community College, and the High School of Commerce. Across his work with young people and adults, his focus has been equity, self-empowerment, healing, and helping people understand one another across difference.
At LightHouse, Rec helps build the practices that strengthen our community every day and leads the work of repair when something breaks.
His approach begins with curiosity.
What happened?
What was going on for you?
Who was affected?
What needs to happen to make it right?
This work is deeply relational. It requires trust, safety, and time.
It looks like a student saying out loud what they have never been able to say to anyone at school. It looks like someone who caused harm hearing how it landed and staying in the room. It looks like vulnerability, met with understanding and connection.
It also means adults taking responsibility for their own impact, in how they treat one another and how they treat young people. Adults set the example for what cooperation, care, and respect look like.
A lot of healing happens in these rooms.
“Whenever there is a situation that involves tension or conflict I consider the importance of being present and clear so that I can adequately facilitate a meaningful dialogue that is grounded in respect, deep understanding, and a safe space that fosters agency.”
“The goal is never a quick fix but rather the process of cultivating a meaningful conversation that supports growth, healing and self awareness.”
— Carlos “Rec” McBride, Director of Restorative Culture and Belonging
There is good reason to invest in this work.
Research has repeatedly challenged the idea that punishment and exclusion make schools safer. The American Psychological Association’s Zero Tolerance Task Force found little evidence that punitive, exclusionary approaches improve behavior or school safety.
In a randomized trial in Pittsburgh Public Schools, suspension days fell 36 percent in schools using restorative practices, compared with 18 percent in control schools.
Belonging matters too. In the CDC’s 2021 survey of more than 17,000 high school students, those who felt that adults and peers cared about them reported much lower rates of poor mental health, and a meta-analysis of 82 studies links school belonging to stronger engagement, achievement, and attendance.
This kind of change takes time, often three to five years.
So we invest in relationship, and we stay with it.
Belonging across difference is a skill, and people build it through practice.
We need practice playing with others.
Young people need chances to listen closely, ask better questions, explain themselves, reconsider assumptions, disagree without dismissing each other, repair misunderstandings, and find a way to work together anyway.
Putting different people in the same room does not produce any of this on its own. It grows in a community where people know one another, depend on one another, make things together, and trust each other enough to stay in relationship when things get complicated.
That is part of what school can be.
Young people develop through experience. We can learn about diversity as a concept, but we learn to navigate difference by doing it.
A strong community is one where people who differ learn how to belong together.