Welcome back to this week’s segment of After School Tea Time! Get your tea cups ready because we have more to spill this week! Keep your questions coming because you could be helping someone who has similar questions!

Question from New Haven County- Recently in our program, we did an activity that required the students to split into small groups. We allowed the students to pick their own groups. We noticed that there was one student left out and none of the groups wanted this student to join their group. My staff could not understand why this happened. What can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Hey New Haven, thank you for asking this question. A student should never feel excluded, especially if it is an activity that requires group participation. It seems like there may be some things that need to be addressed with the whole class. Have a group discussion with the class and remind them that they should not exclude other students from joining groups. Make sure that this is already one of your classroom norms. This may have happened for a number of reasons. Was this student new? Do the students in your program already have formed friend groups? Also give them the perspective that if someone didn’t want them to join their group for activities it wouldn’t make them feel good either. Create some sort of penalty if it happens again. You could say that if it happens again then all activities will be done individually instead of in groups. Also, make sure that you have a conversation with the student that was excluded and let them know that they have support. Here is an article about how students can practice kindness and compassion. We hope this helps!

We’ll see you next week for another segment of After School Tea Time! Don’t forget to submit your anonymous questions here.