Every outcome has a classroom behind it. Attendance, academic results and behavioral incidents are visible outcomes of what happens in classrooms every day. But by the time an outcome changes, the conditions behind it may have been shifting for weeks or months.
This is the difference between lagging and leading indicators.
Lagging indicators tell us what has already happened: test scores, attendance, suspensions, or results from an annual wellbeing survey. They are important, but they arrive after the fact.
Leading indicators show what is happening before those outcomes move. They capture the conditions that make positive outcomes more or less likely; things like connection, safety, engagement, energy, and students’ experience of belonging.
Too often the potential in leading indicators is going unnoticed.
What gets missed
Schools often have extensive data about outcomes, but much less continuous insight into the classroom conditions producing them. A class can gradually become less connected, more unsettled, or less engaged without this showing up immediately in attendance or academic performance. By the time a lagging indicator signals a problem, the opportunity to intervene early may have passed.
This is why real-time classroom-level data matters. A classroom is where many of the conditions behind school-wide outcomes are created, and where they can still be changed.
By the time a lagging indicator tells us something is wrong, the classroom may have been moving in that direction for months.
Amalie Danckert, Co-founder of WOOF
What this means for the classroom
For teachers, leading indicators create an opportunity to notice change while there is still time to respond.
Instead of waiting for a problem to become visible through behavior, attendance or academic results, teachers can see shifts in the class itself: Is the class becoming more connected? Is energy dropping? Are students feeling less safe or engaged?
Frequent check-ins make the small things legible: a group going quiet, continuous patterns in good and bad weekdays, a small continuous decline over weeks or months.
The value is not simply knowing what is happening. It is having enough visibility to ask: What should we do about it? Continuous insight can help teachers adjust, try something new, and see whether the change is making a difference.
What this means for the school
For school leaders, this creates a different way of understanding what is happening across classrooms.
Rather than relying primarily on annual surveys or end-of-term outcomes, leaders can see emerging patterns while they are still developing. A struggling classroom or a struggling grade can be supported earlier. A positive change can be recognized sooner and build momentum. And school initiatives can be followed through at the level where implementation actually happens: the classroom.
Leading indicators do not replace outcome data. They complement it.
Classes with higher average belonging scores also tended to have higher math assessment scores.
Anita Restrepo, University of Chicago
This finding comes from a quasi-experiment by researchers from the University of Chicago, studying three schools working with WOOF and how classroom-level belonging and mood scores relate to academic and behavioral outcomes over time.
