Introdution
Student belonging is deceptively simple to describe. A student feels like they have a place here and that the people around them actually want them there. That’s it. But for a lot of students, that sense is one distracted teacher look or one ambiguous comment away from collapsing.
Picture this: a student who was curious and engaged throughout primary school arrives in Year 7 and slowly disappears. By the end of first term they’ve stopped raising their hand, grades are sliding, and they’re getting pulled up for things that were never a problem before. Their teachers have a word for it: disengaged.
That’s not a diagnosis. It’s a symptom.
What this student is experiencing is what researcher Geoffrey L. Cohen calls belonging uncertainty — a low-grade, persistent doubt about whether they are truly accepted here, or ever could be. Cohen’s book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides (2022) makes a compelling case that this doubt, once it takes hold, reshapes everything about how a student shows up at school.
What “Belonging Uncertainty” Really Means for Student Belonging
Student belonging is not a soft concept. Cohen (2022) is unequivocal about this: it’s a prerequisite for learning, not a nice-to-have.
Here’s why. When a student isn’t sure whether they truly belong, part of their mental bandwidth is constantly monitoring for signals. Are people responding to what I say? Does my teacher think I’m capable? Does this school have room for someone like me? That monitoring costs cognitive resources, and those resources come directly out of the budget for actually learning.
Cohen (2022) points out that this uncertainty isn’t distributed equally. Students from groups that are stereotyped or underrepresented — by race, socioeconomic background, gender in certain subjects, or first-generation status — are far more exposed. A single ambiguous moment (a distracted look, an offhand remark) can tip them toward the question that belonging uncertainty always circles back to: does this place have space for me?
And once that question becomes loud enough, it tends to confirm itself. A student who doubts belonging pulls back. Pulling back leads to worse results. Worse results seem to confirm the original doubt. The research Cohen (2022) synthesises shows this cycle clearly, and it doesn’t resolve on its own.
Why “Just Be Nice” Is Not Enough
Schools generally try. Posters on the wall. Inclusive language in policies. A whole-staff push to “be kind.” None of that is wrong, but Cohen (2022) argues it’s not enough.
The issue is that belonging uncertainty is psychological. It lives in how students interpret what happens to them, not just in what actually happens. A student who already doubts their place will often read critical feedback as confirmation they were never meant to be there, even if the same teacher gives the same feedback to everyone. What shifts outcomes isn’t kindness as a general atmosphere. It’s the specific, intentional signals students receive about whether they are believed in (Cohen, 2022).
6 Evidence-Based Strategies to Foster Student Belonging
1. Give wise feedback
The most counterintuitive thing about this strategy is that it works precisely because it doesn’t soften the critique. Cohen (2022) describes studies where teachers added one sentence to written feedback: “I am giving you these comments because I have high standards, and I know you can meet them.”
That’s it. No grade change. No extra praise. Just that sentence.
It significantly reduced the achievement gap. Students who had been doubting their student belonging were more likely to revise their work, and those revisions were meaningfully stronger. Without the signal, criticism can register as the teacher having already given up on a student. With it, the same criticism reads as an invitation to rise (Cohen, 2022).
2. Run a brief social belonging intervention
Walton and Cohen (2011) ran what sounds, on paper, like an almost absurdly simple intervention. First-year university students read short accounts from older students describing how they’d felt out of place at the start, and how that changed. Then they wrote a brief reflection on their own experience. The whole thing took under an hour.
Three years later, students from underrepresented groups who went through the exercise showed measurable improvements in GPA and wellbeing compared to peers who hadn’t. The mechanism is straightforward: it reframes student belonging uncertainty from a personal verdict into a normal, temporary phase (Walton & Cohen, 2011). This is the power of narrative.
You can do a version of this at the start of any unit or school year. Collect anonymous quotes from students who navigated the transition before and share them. Let the message land: this doubt makes sense, it fades, and it says nothing about whether you belong here. Pair it with social-emotional check-in questions to open up the conversation further.
3. Use values affirmation exercises
Values affirmation is a 10–15 minute written exercise where students reflect on something that genuinely matters to them: family, creativity, a sport, faith, friendship. Cohen (2022) found that a single session can have measurable effects on student belonging that persist for an entire academic year.
Why does it work? When students are under academic threat, their sense of self tends to shrink down to the one domain where they feel threatened. The exercise widens it back out. School performance becomes something you’re working on, not who you are. That shift in framing reduces the psychological cost of struggling, which makes it easier to stay engaged (Cohen, 2022).
4. Reframe transition narratives
Transitions are high-risk moments for student belonging. Starting secondary school, entering the Diploma Programme, arriving mid-year from another country — these are all points where a student has no track record yet and no established sense of their place. Early experiences here carry unusual weight (Cohen, 2022).
What Cohen (2022) found works is sharing real stories from students who made the same transition. Not polished success stories, but honest accounts of the early doubt and how it gradually resolved. The specificity matters. “I didn’t know where to sit at lunch for three weeks” is more useful than any general reassurance, because it tells the new student that their doubt is recognisable, not unique to them. If you’re building a formal induction, these induction activities for first-year MYP students offer a practical starting point.
5. Engineer identity-safe cues
Students walk into classrooms and read them fast. Who’s on the wall? Whose names come up in the texts? Whose contributions get treated as knowledge worth having? Cohen (2022) calls these “identity cues,” and the research shows they matter even when students don’t consciously register them.
In one study Cohen (2022) describes, researchers changed the physical environment of a computer science classroom. Geek-culture posters replaced with nature scenes and general art. Women’s sense of student belonging in the subject increased significantly, and so did their interest in pursuing it. The course content didn’t change at all. The room did.
For teachers, this means auditing the texts you assign and the examples you reach for — not for tokenism, but to ask honestly whether the curriculum, as it’s currently presented, signals that there is room for the kinds of people sitting in your classroom.
6. Harness peer influence
Paluck et al. (2016) studied anti-conflict interventions across 56 schools and discovered something that defies traditional teaching instincts: whole-school programs have remarkably limited impact. What actually shifts social norms isn’t a lecture from the podium, but the behavior of “social referents”—students who are highly connected across different peer groups. When these well-networked students publicly modeled positive behavior, the entire school culture shifted.
This happens because students are biologically wired to take their cues about what is “normal” or “safe” from each other, not from adults. Consequently, a true sense of belonging isn’t found in a teacher’s syllabus or a school’s mission statement. Instead, it is forged in the furnace of daily peer-to-peer micro-interactions: a quick smile, an invited seat at a table, or a respectful response to a “wrong” answer. When the students whom others naturally pay attention to are the ones welcoming contributions, inclusion becomes the classroom’s “default setting.”
For educators, this means that setting the tone requires more than just messaging; it requires strategy. To build a truly psychologically safe spaces space, you must identify which students have the broadest social reach and empower them with visible roles. By guiding the “influencers” to model curiosity and kindness, you don’t just tell students they belong—you show them, through the voices they actually trust.
Bonus: Small shifts, big signals
Cohen (2022) describes a set of micro-level adjustments that don’t require planning. He calls it situation-crafting: small changes in how you interact that send clear student belonging signals without restructuring anything.
A few worth trying:
- Try using honorifics. “Mr. Garcia” or “Ms. Castro” instead of first names. Cohen (2022) recounts a teacher who tried this with a notoriously difficult class and saw the dynamic shift within a week. Dignity offered tends to come back.
- Your nonverbal cues carry more weight than you might expect. Eye contact, leaning in, a raised eyebrow of genuine interest — students read these as signals that you believe they have something worth saying. Students from marginalised groups are especially attuned to the reverse (Cohen, 2022).
- Say “I think” rather than “the fact of the matter is.” It keeps discussion open and signals that the student’s reasoning belongs in the room, not on trial.
- Ask more than you tell. Cohen (2022) notes that research on effective tutors shows they spend up to 90% of interactions asking questions. “Tell me more about why you think that” does more work than a correction.
- Start with a check-in. Two minutes at the start of class that treat the student as a whole person before treating them as a learner. These check-in activities are a practical place to start.
- Share struggle stories from older students. Not polished successes — the real thing: the doubt, the confusion, the moment it started to feel possible. A story that mirrors what students are currently going through is more useful than a motivational quote (Cohen, 2022).
- Have students write advice to incoming students about how they got through their own early doubts. Cohen (2022) cites research showing that when students articulate the message for someone else, they internalise it more deeply themselves.
Where to start on Monday
Pick one student. The one you’ve been most worried about lately. Think about what kind of student belonging doubt they might be carrying. Consider whether they feel they have a real place here or if people like them actually succeed here. Ask yourself if they fear the doubt they feel is permanent.
Then ask yourself: what is one concrete signal I can send this week?
It doesn’t need to be a programme. Cohen (2022) is clear that a single well-timed intervention can shift a student’s trajectory in ways that persist. This might be a note on an essay, a five-minute check-in, or a values reflection. The science on student belonging is, in the end, a science of small moments that compound over time.
Student-Belonging
References
Cohen, G. L. (2022). Belonging: The science of creating connection and bridging divides. W. W. Norton & Company.
Paluck, E. L., Shepherd, H., & Aronow, P. M. (2016). Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(3), 566–571. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1514483113
Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1198364
