Improving School Climate

Practical Strategies to Reduce Behavior Problems and Promote Social and Emotional Learning

George G. Bear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780815346401
• eBook ISBN: 9781351170468
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Improving School Climate provides evidence-based and practical strategies for cultivating a healthy school environment, while also avoiding behavior problems.

The book is packed with strategies centered on key components and conditions for a positive school climate, such as positive teacher-student relationships, positive student-student relationships (including absence of bullying), supportive home-school relationships, student engagement, effective classroom management and school discipline, school safety, and student self-discipline.

This text is an important inclusion for educators and school psychologists who prefer a structured, evidence-based, and practical approach for improving school climate, while also promoting students' academic achievements, preventing behavior problems, and fostering students' social and emotional competencies.

Chapter 1

School Climate

An Albatross, Unicorn, or Phoenix?

In a comprehensive and classic review of the literature on school climate almost 40 years ago, Anderson (1982) posed a question that resonates today: Is school climate best viewed as an albatross, a unicorn, or a phoenix? As an albatross, school climate would be viewed as something undesirable—as “a burden” to policymakers “who need information on mechanisms that can be easily manipulated to affect student outputs” (p. 371). School climate, especially when viewed at that time by many as an unidimensional construct, failed to provide much guidance for school improvement. As a unicorn, however, school climate would be viewed by policymakers as something desired, yet unattainable, as something “to be hoped for and dreamt about but one which can never be found” (p. 371). If viewed as either an albatross or unicorn, it would be best for researchers to avoid school climate. This was because of unclear and inconsistent definitions and the lack of theoretical conceptualizations, measures, and guiding theories; difficulties with statistical analyses; and little research demonstrating the value of school climate and the effort for improvement. Researchers would be better off focusing on classroom effects on student behavior since they had been shown to be much greater than school level effects—a finding that is still true today (e.g., Bierman et al., 2007).

Instead of an albatross or unicorn, Anderson (1982) suggested that more optimistic educators and researchers might view school climate as a phoenix, as something desired and possible—“born of the ashes of past school effects research” (p. 372). But as a phoenix, school climate would need to be conceptualized not as a unidimensional, or singular, construct but as a multidimensional construct consisting of a combination of interrelated school characteristics shown to determine student learning and behavior, and ones that schools could successfully target for change. Those characteristics would be schoolwide, beyond the individual and classroom levels, reflecting the overall school environment. For a phoenix to arise, the greatest challenge to researchers was to address major shortcomings of earlier research on school climate. This called for (a) more clear and consistent definitions, conceptualizations, and measures of school climate; (b) theoretical frameworks to guide school climate research and practice, including how it is conceptualized and measured; (c) psychometrically sound measures of school climate; and (d) empirical research identifying domains or dimensions of school climate that schools could target for improvement to help achieve educationally important outcomes.

Rising of a Phoenix

At the time of Anderson’s (1982) review of the literature, it is likely that a greater number of researchers and policymakers viewed school climate as an albatross or unicorn than a phoenix, as during that period school climate received little attention in educational research and practice. More recently, however, a phoenix has arisen, largely due to the great strides researchers and policymakers have made in addressing the major shortcomings of earlier research, as listed above. This is reflected in a rapidly growing body of research on school climate, as seen throughout this book, and in school climate being a focus of schoolwide programs for improving academic achievement, preventing behavior problems, and promoting social and emotional well-being. Those programs include universal-level social and emotional learning (SEL) programs that target the development of a wide range of social and emotional competencies, such as self-management, social awareness, and responsible decision-making (see Chapter 4); School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS), which tend to focus more on the direct teaching and reinforcement of specific and desired student behaviors for improving school climate (Sailor, Dunlap, Sugai & Horner, 2009); and programs that are directed toward more specific problems or concerns, such as bullying (Swearer & Hymel, 2015) and on school violence and safety (Borum, Cornell, Modzeleski, & Jimerson, 2010).

Recognition of the importance of school climate also is seen in the following actions taken and funding and resources provided by the United States Department of Education (U.S. DOE):

• The Every Student Succeeds Act requiring that schools use a minimum of four accountability indicators, with one such indicator being school quality, which may consist of “school climate and safety” (see www.ed.gov/essa).
• Beginning in 2014 and continuing annually, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education providing states and local education agencies with School Climate Transformation Grants to improve (and assess) school climate.
• Developing the web-based ED School Climate Survey (EDSCLS; U.S. DOE, Office of Safe and Healthy Schools, 2019a) for states and schools to assess students’ perceptions of school climate in middle and high school, examine national data, and receive scores in real time.
• Developing a compendium of school climate measures for schools to draw from (see https://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/topic-research/school-climate-measurement/school-climate-survey-compendium).
• Creating and disseminating school climate materials and resources to schools, including a Quick Guide on Making School Climate Improvements (U.S. DOE, Office of Safe and Healthy Students, 2016) and the Parent and Educator Guide to School Climate Resources (U.S. DOE, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2019). These documents explain the concept of school climate, offer suggestions for improving school climate, and provide parents and educators with additional school climate resources.

How School Climate is Commonly Defined, Conceptualized, and Measured

How school climate is defined, conceptualized, and measured varies greatly in research, policy, and practice. Definitions of school climate differ in abstractness and the extent to which they recognize multiple domains and dimensions of school climate, and which ones are included and excluded. For example, among popular definitions appearing in the literature, Haynes, Emmons, and Ben-Avie (1997) defined school climate in rather general and abstract terms, with a specific focus on interpersonal relationships, or interactions, that influence children. That is, they defined school climate as “the quality and consistency of interpersonal interactions within the school community that influence children’s cognitive, social, and psychological development” (p. 322). Placing greater emphasis on school safety, Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, and Pickeral (2009) defined school climate as “the quality and character of school life” that includes “norms, values, and expectations that support people feeling socially, emotionally, and physically safe” (p. 182).

In fairness to both of these teams of researchers, whereas their definitions were largely unidimensional, they conceptualized and measured school climate as a multi-dimensional construct. The School Climate Scale developed by Haynes, Emmons, and colleagues (Emmons, Haynes, & Comer, 2002; Haynes, Emmons, & Comer, 1994) includes the following six subscales: Student Interpersonal Relations, Student-Teacher Relations, Parent Involvement, Order and Discipline, Fairness, and Sharing of Resources. Likewise, Cohen et al. (2009), together with the National School Climate Council and the National School Climate Center (NSCC), conceptualized school climate as consisting of four major domains: relationships, safety, teaching and learning, and institutional environment. The NSCC (2019) also recently added leadership and professional relations and social media as additional domains of school climate (assessed on the teacher survey), although it is unclear why these two were added. The measure of school climate developed by the NSCC, the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (NSCC, 2019b), includes 13 subscales: Rules and Norms, Sense of Physical Security, Sense of Social-Emotional Security, Support for Learning, Social and Civic Learning, Respect for Diversity, Social Support-Adults, Social Support-Students, School Connectedness/Engagement, Physical Surroundings, Social Media, Leadership, and Professional Relationships.

More recently, the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (2019) defined school climate as: “a broad, multifaceted concept that involves many aspects of the student’s educational experience” while noting that a positive school climate is “the product of a school’s attention to fostering safety; promoting a supportive academic, disciplinary, and physical environment; and encouraging and maintaining respectful, trusting, and caring relationships throughout the school community no matter the setting—from Pre-K/Elementary School to higher education.”

In its Parent and Educator Guide to School Climate Resources (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2019), and drawing from a description of school climate by the National Center on Safe and Supportive Learning Environments, the U.S. DOE recently characterized school climate as follows:

School climate reflects how members of the school community experience the school, including interpersonal relationships, teacher and other staff practices, and organizational arrangements. School climate includes factors that serve as conditions for learning and that support physical and emotional safety, connection and support, and engagement. … A positive school climate reflects attention to fostering social and physical safety, providing support that enables students and staff to realize high behavioral and academic standards as well as encouraging and maintaining respectful, trusting, and caring relationships throughout the school community.

(p. 2)

This description emphasizes three general domains of school climate: connectedness and support (or relationships), safety, and engagement. These three domains also are found in the U.S. DOE’s Safe and Supportive School Model of School Climate developed by a national panel of researchers and other experts on school climate for the U.S. DOE. That model was developed to guide schools in identifying key areas for creating “safe and supportive climates in their schools” (National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, 2019). It now serves as the framework for the web-based ED School Climate Survey (EDSCLS; U.S. DOE, Office of Safe and Healthy Students, 2019), which is used by states, local education agencies, and schools to assess school climate. However, instead of calling categories connectedness and support, safety, and engagement, the three main categories are called engagement, safety, and environment. As shown in Figure 1.1, the model includes 13 domains subsumed under these three categories.

Figure 1.1 U.S. Department of Education’s Model of School Climate

It is unclear how these domains and their contents originated, and why the contents were assigned to the given categories. For example, it is perplexing that the category of engagement includes relationships and school participation but excludes other elements of engagement commonly recognized among researchers, particularly cognitive and behavioral engagement. Instructional environment, which might be viewed as encompassing those two forms of engagement, is grouped under the category of environment which seems to consist of a hodgepodge of school environmental characteristics (i.e., physical environment, instructional environment, discipline) and other factors that are typically viewed by researchers as outcomes of those and other characteristics of school climate (i.e., mental health, physical health). It also is unclear why substance abuse is viewed as a distinct dimension of school climate (might one also include weapons?) and why there is a need to include five separate dimensions of safety (which are likely closely correlated, and unlikely distinct).

Perhaps most baffling is why the three categories for assessing school climate (engagement, safety, environment) differ from the three categories of school climate recognized elsewhere by the U.S. DOE as constituting school climate—connectedness and support, safety, and engagement. As discussed later, the latter three categories represent the three domains most widely recognized by researchers as representing the construct of school climate. Unfortunately, no supporting research is currently given in the technical manual (or on the government websites) to justify the inclusion of these three domains and what they comprise.

Common Domains of School Climate

As seen in the 13 subscales of the National Center for School Climate’s Comprehensive School Climate Inventory and the 13 domains of school climate assessed in the U.S. DOE’s Safe and Supportive School Model of School Climate (2019), measures and conceptualizations of school climate are often quite broad and vary greatly in what they include. Cornell and Huang (2019) note that such broad conceptual models and measures of school climate

have the virtue of being comprehensive but may risk overinclusiveness and lose meaningfulness. If every aspect of a school is part of its climate, then it is not clear what the concept means and how it can be related to other important school characteristics.

(p. 159)

They further comment that “The school’s climate should be distinguishable from other elements of the school environment, such as the condition of the building, the quality of its teachers, its curriculum, or the demographics of its students. Otherwise, the term school climate means little more than ‘the school’” (p. 159).

Fortunately, reviews of the research literature have identified a small number of domains, typically four or five, that are common across measures of school climate. Zullig, Koopman, Patton, and Ubbes (2010) identified five domains: (1) social relationships (teacher-student and student-student); (2) order, safety, and discipline; (3) academic outcomes; (4) school facilities; and (5) school connectedness (e.g., liking of school). Note that the domain of school connectedness is often included on other measures under the domain of relationships or community; thus, one might argue that the review identified four, not five, domains.

In their review of measures of school climate, Ramelow, Currie, and Felder-Puig (2015) found that of the four domains of school climate identified by Cohen et al. (2009) (i.e., relationships, safety, teaching and learning, and institutional environment) the domains of relationships and safety (which included rules and expectations) were most often found on measures of school climate, whereas the domain of teaching and learning and the domain of environmental-structural were found the least. Interestingly, they found no measure that included all four domains.

In a more comprehensive review of the research literature, which included 297 empirical studies, Wang and Degol (2016) concluded that school climate was best conceptualized as comprised of four broad domains: community, safety, academic, and institutional environment. Within those four domains they further identified 13 more specific dimensions, with the community domain consisting of quality of relationships (teacher-student and teacher-staff), connectedness (i.e., sense of belonging), respect for diversity (including fairness and autonomy), and partnership (i.e., parent involvement); the safety domain consisting of social/emotional safety (including lack of bullying), discipline and order (including fairness and clarity of school rules), and physical safety; the academic domain consisting of teaching and learning, professional development, and administrative leadership; and the institutional environment consisting of structural organization (e.g., class size, school size, ability grouping) and availability of resources (i.e., supplies, materials, equipment). The authors cited research linking each of the four domains to valued academic, behavioral, and psychological and social outcomes for students, while recognizing that the research base is stronger for the academic and community domains than for the safety and institutional environment domains. They also found that few measures included the institutional environment domain.

In sum, although there is no one commonly recognized definition of school climate and reviews of the literature find that measures of school climate vary greatly in their composition, there is growing consensus among researchers that school climate includes four broad domains: (1) interpersonal relationships (also referred to as social support, connectedness, and community); (2) safety, order, and discipline (also referred to as structure); (3) engagement (also referred to as academics or teaching and learning); and (4) institutional environment (also called school facilities, environmental-structural). Reviews conclude, however, that the fourth domain is seldom found on measures of school climate, and when found it varies greatly as to what aspects of the institutional environment are assessed.

Several other conclusions are commonly shared by reviewers of the literature (Anderson, 1982; Cornell & Huang, 2019; Ramelow et al., 2015; Wang & Degol, 2016)—conclusions that should guide the development, or a school’s choice, of school climate measures. First, very few measures have been guided by a theoretical framework. Models and meas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributing Author
• 1 School Climate: An Albatross, Unicorn, or Phoenix?
• 2 Promoting Positive Teacher-Student Relationships
• 3 Promoting Positive Student-Student Relationships
• 4 Developing Social and Emotional Competencies and Self-Discipline
• 5 Teacher-Centered Strategies for Preventing Behavior Problems
• 6 Correcting Behavior Problems
• 7 Fostering Student Engagement
• 8 Preventing and Reducing Bullying
• 9 School Safety: What Works and What Doesn’t
• 10 Assessing School Climate and Linking Results to Effective Practices
• References
• Index