A Smarter Path to Better Grades: Train Student Leaders

Research has shown again and again that students do better in school when they feel like they belong.  They are more likely to engage, attend, persist, and succeed.

Connections starts with a simple but powerful idea: if belonging matters so much, schools should not rely only on adults to create it. They should also train students to build it for one another through everyday soft leadership.

Soft leadership does not mean giving speeches or having a fancy title.

It means the small, real actions that help other students feel supported: welcoming someone new, cheering others on, making sure everyone gets a turn, helping a peer who feels unsure, working together through a challenge, or explaining something to someone who needs help.

That is exactly the kind of support students described in their exit tickets.

The data point in the same direction. In an analysis of 586 exit tickets from 44 Connections events, the strongest and most consistent predictor of belonging was whether students said they had built stronger peer relationships.

In other words, the clearest signal in the data was not just whether students had fun or liked the activity. It was whether they felt more connected to other students.

The difference was striking.

Students who reported stronger peer relationships were far more likely to report very high belonging. Only about 1 in 10 students in the “Agree” group reached that top level of belonging, compared with about 8 in 10 in the “Strongly Agree” group. And the exit tickets told the same story: as belonging rose, more students talked about being helped, encouraged, included, and supported by their peers.

That is why Connections is so promising.

For students who are already tired, discouraged, or checked out, more tutoring or more seat time can just feel like more of the same. Sometimes the problem is not that students need more classes. It is that they need a better reason to care about the classes they already have.

Based on what we have seen so far, there is good reason to think Connections can be more cost-effective than many traditional interventions. Why? Because it is not just helping one student at a time. It is developing student leaders whose influence can spread to several peers at once.

Instead of paying again and again to deliver support student by student, Connections helps schools get more value out of the classes, teachers, and opportunities they already have.

That is the innovation. Schools usually invest in adults to change student outcomes from the outside in.

Connections invests in students to change school culture from the inside out. It treats student leaders as an untapped resource for building belonging at scale.

And that may be one of the smartest paths to better grades: not just giving students more instruction, but helping more students want to make the most of the instruction they are already getting.