We investigate how teachers’ mindsets—or their beliefs about learning and school—relate to adolescents’ individual and collective reports of classroom belonging. Our pre-registered analyses of 1,200 middle school students show that teachers’ growth mindset and confidence in teaching positively relate to students’ math class belonging—explaining 40 percent of belonging among classes. Yet a teacher’s own sense of school belonging is unrelated to the belonging students feel in class. We also find that the conditional association between math teaching confidence and students’ classroom belonging is twice as strong for Black adolescents as it is for their White peers, and a teacher’s growth mindset has no bearing on Asian adolescents’ math class belonging.
Teacher Mindsets and Student Sense of Classroom Belonging