The case for prioritizing belonging in schools has never been more compelling. Its value is increasingly recognized—not only for student well-being (Carrington, 2019; Prilleltensky, 2020) but also for academic performance (TNTP, 2024). When students feel seen, valued, and part of a community, they’re more likely to thrive socially, emotionally, and academically.
For many educators, this acknowledgment is overdue: Achievement scores have long dominated conversations about school effectiveness, and standards often take center stage during collaborative planning. Yet we know student outcomes encompass far more than test scores. Students’ well-being and sense of connection should carry weight in conversations about performance.
But first, we have to measure belonging. Often, it’s assessed in subjective terms—the “feel” of a school. While there’s truth in these impressions, school leaders must develop more practical measures to capture and quantify students’ experience of belonging. This can be done by constructing a composite picture—a mosaic—that reflects how students feel and function within their school environment.
With 16 years in education—including nearly a decade as a school leader—I’ve seen firsthand, as principal of Powderhorn Elementary in Jefferson County, Colorado, how data can support intentional efforts to strengthen belonging. Data-informed practices can help educators form a composite picture, assist them in identifying students’ unique needs, and guide them in developing plans to strengthen belonging. This work requires combining numerous data points that highlight each student’s individuality—because, just as with academic performance, students are people, not data points, and feelings of belonging can be thoughtfully gauged to reflect this truth.
The process starts with gathering information through multiple measures, such as relationship maps and student perception surveys. Those are the steps of generation, the dots and points that lead to analysis and action, such as the creation of mentor groups, buddy classrooms, and small groups targeting specific durable skills. These measures and methods mirror familiar academic planning processes: gathering data from diverse sources and using it to design a plan aligned to specific goals. Dots from maps and points from surveys are the source material for creating a mosaic of belonging—a fuller picture of student connection that helps schools build relationships with intention.
Gathering Data: Mapping and Surveys
Relationships, and specifically, connections between adults and students, are at the core of belonging in schools. Relationship mapping, which draws on principles of network analysis, is one method for making those connections visible.
I collaborated with our school counselor to develop a simple, accessible process to map adult-student relationships. The counselor created posters listing the name of every student in our school and placed them in the staff lounge for two weeks. Staff were asked to stick a green dot next to a student’s name if they could confidently put a face to that name, with the caveat that they could not currently be that student’s homeroom teacher. This helped us identify which students had meaningful connections with adults outside of their primary classroom.
Afterward, we analyzed the posters to identify specific students without an adult connection and paired them with an adult mentor. For mentors, we tapped non-instructional staff across a range of roles, such as custodial, cafeteria, and front office staff, because these individuals are already familiar to students and are caring and consistent presences in the school community. Our school counselor met with these mentors monthly throughout the year to offer preparation and support: They traded ideas for trauma-informed topics of connection (for example, “What excites you about school this week?”), shared challenges, and worked together to find solutions. Mentors, in turn, met with their student for 15–20 minutes each month, typically during lunch.
Before the year’s end, I overheard a conversation between one mentor and the physical education teacher strategizing about how to support a student through their difficult week—evidence that the mentor’s care and willingness to collaborate extended beyond their assigned role. Several mentors shared that participating in the program was a highlight of their year.
Though our relationship map was thorough, we did not assume our perceptions told the full story. We needed to know what students thought, so we created a perception survey that asked students about their level of connection with adults at school. Their voices added a critical addition to the composite picture of belonging that was beginning to form.
Every student answered two statements on a Google Form tagged with a thumbs up/down icon: “I have a friend at school” and “There is an adult that believes in me and cares for me at school.” We soon realized that simply inviting students to respond to these statements helped them know they mattered to us. It also prompted us to introduce schoolwide community circles held at the start of each day to intentionally affirm students’ presence and sense of connection.
We mapped relationships and surveyed students again the next year. This time, we added the stipulation that for a staff member to place a green dot next to a student’s name, they also had to write a strength they knew about that student. The process revealed something important—we “knew” fewer students than the year before. Staff still recognized most students by name, but not always by strength. We also added a new prompt to the student perception survey: “My teachers know something I’m good at.”
The data affirmed what our staff exercise had suggested: We needed to do more to elevate student strengths. We focused our professional learning on ways to surface student strengths and validate the strengths they recognize in themselves. We modeled community circles with staff that included questions for prompting students to voice their own strengths. At the start of PLC meetings, we also asked teachers to select a few students, identify a strength they saw in each, and take a moment to email the student’s caregiver to share it.
By spring, 93 percent of students affirmed that at least one teacher could identify a strength of theirs—an 8 percent increase from the initial fall survey. The dual measures—maps and surveys—made asset-based thinking central to our conversations about students and sparked concrete actions to support them.
Data helps make belonging a visible part of school planning—and should move the community to act on what they learn.
From Data to Action: Connections in Practice
We shared the mapping and survey results transparently with staff from the outset, then posed a question to prompt reflection and action: “How can we increase the number of green dots?” That simple question led to a range of schoolwide changes.
In addition to implementing community circles and mentor groups, we organized lunch groups for students, facilitated by an adult, to help students foster friendships and intentionally skill-build for entering into and sustaining conversation. Staff also created buddy classrooms, pairing older and younger homerooms, which now meet for themed Buddy Days at least once a quarter for students to joyfully convene. These experiences provide students with structured opportunities to practice building relationships. We scaffold each gathering with interactive experiences designed to encourage mutual exchange, such as peer reading or craft activities.
Devoting precious time in professional learning sessions to reflect on data signals its importance: These conversations allow us to not only plan responsive actions like those described but also to recognize and celebrate the emerging mosaic of connections revealed through our data. We share this progress with families, helping them see the positive outcomes of our focus on building connections with and among students.
Our data reflection and analysis has also revealed the need to more explicitly communicate care in our interactions with students. For example, we noticed that students who responded “no” to the survey item, “There is an adult that believes in me and cares for me at school,” were often the same students most frequently sent to the office for discipline referrals. We recognized this as a gap in perception: These students may not have interpreted our structure and accountability as care. In response, my assistant principal and I made deliberate efforts to frame interactions with adjusted language: “We are holding you accountable because we care.”
The language shift changed student perceptions, making them more receptive to the reflections and lessons we tried to instill. For example, if a student is into sports, I’ll ask whether a coach would let a player get away with a mistake—and what would happen if they did. When students acknowledge that the team could lose, we have a real conversation. I explain that I’m holding them accountable for the same reason: I want them to succeed. I care. Students often misread discipline unless we clearly communicate its purpose in terms they understand.
By spring, 93 percent of students affirmed that at least one teacher could identify a strength of theirs.
Sustaining Connections Through Durable Skills
Our observations and student survey responses revealed a clear link between isolation and behavior challenges: When students don’t feel known or supported, discipline can deepen a sense of disconnection. That insight reinforced our commitment to prioritizing repair, rather than punishment, and shaped our adoption of restorative justice practices, which can not only rebuild relationships but also create opportunities for students to practice durable skills like communication, empathy, and self-management that support lasting connection and a sense of belonging.
As an example, when we noticed students were struggling to resolve small conflicts, one skill-building tool we introduced was the Peace Path, a scripted sequence of conflict-resolution steps designed for young people. The script provides students with open-ended sentence frames to insert specific descriptions of their experience. It starts with students sharing what happened from their perspective and explaining how those events made them feel. It then asks them what they need to resolve the situation, to commit to those steps, and then to end on a positive note (a fist-bump, high-five, or hug). Student leaders introduced and modeled it in all classrooms, and we have booklets of the scripted sequence available at strategic locations around the school, such as outside the lunchroom. Now, adults refer students to the Peace Path sequence for minor disputes—and, increasingly, students initiate it themselves. The purpose is for students to hear each other, resolve the issue on their own, restore a sense of connection, and build the skills that reduce future conflict.
It’s likely that existing information—such as office referrals, in the case of the Peace Path—can be added to your mosaic for the purpose of identifying areas where students would benefit from skill-building. The essential step, like with maps or surveys, is to be systematic in its collection to develop an informed response. Attendance records, discipline data, and schoolwide screeners are all forms of data that likely already exist at your school and can be used for this purpose. At Powderhorn, we routinely review each of these data types on a weekly schedule throughout a given month. From those multiple datasets we identify particular durable skills needing attention.
When we observed that students in some grades were struggling with self-management, our counselor collaborated with teachers to schedule targeted lessons. During those sessions, students contributed to a Frayer Model—a four-quadrant graphic organizer for exploring vocabulary—to construct a shared understanding of “respect” and “kindness.” The completed posters still hang in the hallway to remind students what respect and kindness entail. We also shared the tool with families to help reinforce the message at home.
By giving students space to reflect and build skills around targeted concepts like these, we offer more than instruction—we create the opportunity for connection. We see their needs, and we respond not only by teaching essential skills, but by reinforcing students’ sense of being seen, heard, and valued. In this way, belonging and skill-building are not separate goals—they’re mutually reinforcing.
Why the “Mosaic” Matters
Measuring belonging may seem counterintuitive—it’s a human experience, not a number. But with a thoughtful approach, belonging can be measured in meaningful ways. As the green dot exercises and student perception surveys showed, a single data set can be the starting point for piecing together the picture of a school community.
Gathering data helps make belonging a visible part of school planning—and should move the community to act on what they learn. After all, we choose what to focus on each day, and those choices shape what matters in our schools.
Belonging matters—and measures of connection can help leaders ground their practice and direct their school’s attention toward it. Still, data alone isn’t enough. We must prioritize forming relationships across our schools—contributing our own “dots”—and making time for meaningful connection. Because in the end, the essential act of cultivating belonging is simple: being genuinely present.
