School Climate Change

How do I build a positive environment for learning? (ASCD Arias)

Peter DeWitt, Sean Slade

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781416619529
• eBook ISBN: 9781416619550
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Students and educators today face obstacles to student achievement, well-being, and success that are above and beyond traditional instructional and assessment concerns. From low school morale to bullying to shootings, school climate has become a national and global concern.

Research overwhelmingly indicates that a positive school climate promotes cooperative learning, group cohesion, respect, and mutual trust—all of which have in turn been shown to improve the learning environment. In short, a positive school climate is directly related to improved academic achievement at all levels of schooling.

In this ASCD Arias book, Peter DeWitt and Sean Slade explain the most important aspects of school climate and how we can make positive changes in our schools. Readers will learn

* How to engage students and school stakeholders.
* How to empower staff and students and foster autonomy so people take ownership of their ideas and the learning process.
* How to promote inclusivity and equity throughout the school.
* How to create a welcoming, cooperative, and safe school environment that nurtures students' social-emotional needs.

Introduction

With every interaction in a school, we are either building community or destroying it.

—James Comer

As we write, the news reports a story of another school shooting. The most upsetting part might be that we have to use the word another. In the past decade, we have seen too many news stories that use the words school and shooting in the same sentence. We have also heard story after story of rampant bullying both within school walls and on the Internet. All of these incidents of tragedy and conflict affect school climate.

In addition to violence, bullying, and harassment in schools, many school personnel are combating low morale and increased stress levels. We are in an era of increased accountability and, as a consequence, increased repercussions. There are high-stakes tests tied to teacher and administrator evaluation, and many of us hear how morale is at an all-time low. It seems as though this claim has been made every year for the past few years. All of this obviously weighs heavily on our minds. We are aware of the need to create a positive and inclusive school environment, and there is no better time than now to do it. Our students deserve a positive start to their adult lives, and a supportive school climate will help us achieve that outcome.

As members of the National School Climate Council, the steering committee that guides the work of the National School Climate Center (NSCC), we feel this group has an important mission—which includes clearly defining what school climate means. Therefore, let’s begin at the beginning. The NSCC defines school climate as “the quality and character of school life” (2014, para. 3). Furthermore, they go on to state,

School climate is based on patterns of students’, parents’, and school personnel’s experience of school life and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures. A sustainable, positive school climate fosters youth development and learning necessary for a productive, contributing, and satisfying life in a democratic society. This climate includes

• Norms, values, and expectations that support people feeling socially, emotionally, and physically safe.
• People are engaged and respected.
• Students, families, and educators work together to develop, live, and contribute to a shared school vision.
• Educators model and nurture attitudes that emphasize the benefits and satisfaction gained from learning.
• Each person contributes to the operations of the school and the care of the physical environment. (2014, para. 3–4)

It’s important to call attention to the final bullet point: that each person contributes to the operations of the school. Whether we contribute kind, supportive words or give negative responses and are dismissive to new ideas, we are contributing to the school climate. It’s also important to note that school climate and school culture are different. We define school culture as how safe students and teachers feel in their school, whereas a school climate involves a more proactive approach to the entire school infrastructure and everything that comes with that. School climate includes how welcoming staff in the building are, how engaged students are in their own learning, and the instructional strategies teachers use to engage students. It also includes the events that take place during the school year and how welcome parents feel when they not only attend schoolwide events but also come for one-on-one meetings with a teacher or school leader.

School climate is a pervasive thing. Most educators have experienced the positive and negative aspects of it. It’s possible to get a good feel for it within the first five minutes of entering a school. Students send powerful messages through their facial expressions and body language. It’s often possible to tell whether they are busy, noisy, silent, engaged, or bored with just a glance. Look at the state of the playground, parking lot, and school buildings. Are they clean or unkempt? Walk past students and staff, and notice how they watch, look at, greet, or stare at you. Are you welcomed, shunned, or ignored when you enter the building? Look around at the walls; how are they decorated? Open your ears and listen in the hallways. Depending on the school, they may be filled with positive interactions among students and adults or the harsh sounds of adults chastising and hushing students walking between classes.

When we visit schools, we notice all of these things and more. As we move through the building, we look around the hallways. Some of them have student art and writing samples that tell creative stories. Others are bare or sterile because no one took the time to hang anything up. As we move from one classroom to the next, we notice when doors are closed and students are shut in their rooms until the bell rings. Other classrooms are more welcoming with open doors and students interacting with their teacher.

The truth is that every school has a climate. It is either developed—planned with intent—or it is adopted by proxy. When planned with positive intent, it can be supportive, protective, nurturing, and conducive to effective teaching and learning. Unfortunately, when neglected, it can also be unsafe, unsupportive, and disconnected. Imagine that you are a student, teacher, or parent entering such a school on a daily or weekly basis. How would it make you feel: motivated or distracted? Supported or vulnerable?

Most schools still fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. They are equal parts positive (e.g., caring teachers, home or advisory rooms, links to the community) and negative (e.g., punitive behavior policies, lack of a common schoolwide mission, poor school-community connections). Therefore, school communities have a choice. They can decide to be proactive and decide how the environment where they teach and learn is developed, or they can be passive and reactionary to events after the fact. In one instance, the school is crafting and influencing the climate, and in the other it is simply responding to issues that arise. Which approach would you rather take?

Where to Focus

In many school communities, over 50 percent of students do not feel safe in school.

—National School Climate Center

Where It All Begins: The Greatest Impact to School Climate

Whether it’s making sure all marginalized groups (e.g., LGBT, ethnic minority, or special education populations) feel as if they have a voice in the school or it’s turning around a building with low morale, school climate is something with which all schools have to contend. Making school climate more positive should be a yearly goal, which is attended to on a daily basis. It requires trust at the building level, a positive shift in thinking, and a sense of autonomy among students, staff, and teachers. This is not an easy task by any means. As educators, we live in a time of continuous improvement, and some leaders are so focused on “improving” that they forget about feelings, mutual responsibility, shared values and goals, or student and teacher autonomy.

The school is the location where climate is developed and nurtured. Schools may have different appearances, structures, and resources, but they all have two things in common—teachers and students. The climate begins with interactions between them. The positive or negative interchanges that occur can promote a safe, secure, and welcoming space, or they can relegate learning and development to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list.

Clearly, there are differences in building size (i.e., student population) and school level (i.e., elementary, middle, secondary), but school leaders who want to create a more engaging, respectful, and nurturing school climate can follow a series of activities that help boost climate regardless of size, level, or location:

Principals:

• Morning/Afternoon Ambassador: Welcome students off the bus and say goodbye as they go home, regardless of the weather.
• Say Good Morning: Stop by classes before the bell rings to say good morning.
• Visit Classrooms Daily: Go into classrooms every day if possible to observe instruction and engage students. This does not have to be formal.
• Accept and Nurture Diversity: Allow students to be who they truly are. Don’t expect them to be who we think they should be.
• Return Calls: Call parents back and listen to their concerns. Respect the 24-hour rule (i.e., return all phone calls within 24 hours). Sooner is always better.
• Pay Attention to the Main Office: Have a school secretary with whom students love to talk and parents enjoy interacting.
• Make Time for Authentic Conversations: Flip your parent communication and faculty meetings so you can have more in-depth discussions.
• Respect Teacher Diversity: Give teachers the autonomy to make their own decisions in the classroom. They have enough accountability, so help them find the balance they need to engage students in numerous ways.
• Be the Leader: Inspire teachers and students to look beyond test scores and take risks.

Just as administrators play a key role in developing climate across the school, teachers play a critical (and often direct) role in developing a positive climate wherever they are—the staff room, the playground, the hallways, and their own classroom.

Teachers:

• Be a Morning/Afternoon Ambassador: Stand in the doorway every morning to welcome students, say goodbye as they leave the classroom, and (if possible) walk them to the bus. It’s easy to get caught up preparing the day’s activities, but nothing is more important than the students.
• Diversify the Literature: Read books that celebrate the diversity of the class/school or represent the diversity students do not have the privilege to see in their school.
• Engage in Dialogue: Make sure that classroom conversations are dialogues—not monologues (Hattie, 2009). Conversations between students and teachers need to be a two-way street.
• Simplify Parent Communication: Engage with parents through newsletters, e-mails, and mobile apps (e.g., Remind 101), but be mindful that many of these methods tend to be one-sided. If a problem arises with a parent, pick up the phone and talk it out. The phone may seem like an “old” communication tool, but it’s still one of the best ways to communicate with someone effectively.

There has been a lot of research on the importance of student voice (Hattie, 2009), but some teachers only accept the student voices that agree with them or follow their rules. There are also many school leaders who create school climates that are more focused on following rules than on taking risks, which means teachers are more likely to create a similar environment in their own classrooms—often out of fear that they will get caught doing something “wrong” by the administration. Therefore, it’s important to be the positive change that students and teachers need. Offer more positive suggestions for working with difficult students.

Where do school leaders and teachers begin? Everywhere. They need to begin in every part of the classroom and school building. Every interaction—with a parent, a student, a teacher, a leader, an administrator—has an impact on school climate. Make no mistake, this does not mean that everyone has to be polite and avoid disagreements. Quite the contrary, actually. People must be allowed to engage and disagree, because it’s through those disagreements and their resolutions that a positive school climate is allowed to develop.

Research

The tasks of teaching and learning are made easier or harder depending on the prevailing school climate. To ignore this fact ignores both common sense and pedagogical research. School climate refers to “the quality and character of school life” (National School Climate Center, 2014, para. 3). Improving school climate doesn’t end; it is something that needs to be a continuous focus.

A positive school climate is an environment in which all people—not just adults or educators—are engaged and respected and where students, families, and educators work together to develop, live, and contribute to a shared school vision. A positive school climate promotes cooperative learning, group cohesion, respect, and mutual trust—all of which have been shown to directly improve the learning environment (Finnan, Schnepel, & Anderson, 2003; Ghaith, 2003; Kerr, Ireland, Lopes, Craig, & Cleaver, 2004; Thapa, Cohen, Guffey, & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2013). A positive school climate has also been shown to be directly related to academic achievement, which is currently at the forefront of many school and district discussions. This is true across elementary schools (Cook, Murphy, & Hunt, 2000; Freiberg, 1999; Sherblom, Marshall, & Sherblom, 2006; Sterbinksky, Ross, & Redfield, 2006), middle schools (Brand, Felner, Shim, Seitsinger, & Dumas, 2003; Ma & Klinger, 2000), high schools (Lee & Bryk, 1989; Stewart, 2008), and all levels of schooling (Gottfredson & Gottfredson, 1989; MacNeil, Prater, & Busch, 2009).

Moreover, there is also evidence that the effect of a positive school climate not only contributes to immediate student achievement but also seems to persist for years (Hoy, Hannum, & Tschannen-Moran, 1998). Consider the fact that long after students leave specific school environments, they have fond memories of where they grew up and where they went to school. Those students understand that their teachers and school leaders cared for them and did what they could to make sure the students were challenged, engaged, and safe.

Think about all of this for a moment. By altering and improving the climate of our schools and classrooms, we can improve learning, encourage cooperative learning, increase group cohesion, improve levels of respect and mutual trust, and increase academic outcomes over both the short and long term. If this were a federally approved program, we would all be encouraged to spend thousands of dollars on its implementation, but school climate isn’t a program—it’s a process, it’s in our hands, and it costs nothing.

Now take the premise—that both of the authors do—that schools are about more than academic achievement and cognitive development. Schools are about preparing the whole child for a future society and each student’s ability to thrive and prosper in that society. This concept of the whole child is a natural byproduct of a positive and inclusive school climate, which focuses on more than just achievement and promotes the elements of a positive school climate (e.g., empowerment, autonomy, and ownership) by viewing each child as an individual and as a part of the larger school community.

Let’s face it: a school that is engaging and welcoming to students, staff, and parents is a place where everyone wants to go. A safe and supportive school climate reduces absenteeism and aids in reducing dropout rates (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009)). It can also positively affect students’ psychosocial development, including self-esteem (Hoge, Smit, & Hanson, 1990); mitigate the negative effects of self-criticism (Kuperminic, Leadbeater, & Blatt, 2001); and influence a wide range of emotional and mental health outcomes (Kuperminic, Leadbeater, Emmons, & Blatt, 1997; Payton et al., 2008; Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989; Shochet, Dadds, Ham, & Montague, 2006; Way, Reddy, & Rhodes, 2007).

Finally, research bears out that school climate can affect risk-taking behaviors among students, including drug and alcohol use/abuse (LaRusso, Romer, & Selman, 2008), suspension rates (Lee, Cornell, Gregory, & Fan, 2011; Wu, Pink, Crain, & Moles, 1982), and effective risk prevention (Berkowitz & Bier, 2006; Catalano, Berglund, Ryan, Lonczak, & Hawkins, 2002; Greenberg et al., 2003).

What does this all boil down to? Climate matters. And what matters most is whether that climate is positive (supportive of students, teachers, teaching, and learning) or negative (unsupportive, fragile, fearful, and confrontational).

A Positive Example

School climate is complicated, but sometimes leaders make it more complicated than it needs to be. What’s difficult for some people to understand is that fostering a positive environment begins the first day they step into a leadership role. This doesn’t necessarily mean the first official day on the job. Consider the following vignette, whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Encore Divider
• School Climate Change
• References
• About the Author
• Copyright