School Climate
Measuring, Improving and Sustaining Healthy Learning Environments
- 240 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
Like a strong foundation in a house, the climate of a school is the foundation that supports the structures of teaching and learning. This book provides a framework for educators to look at school and classroom climates using both informal and formal measures. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of climate and details techniques which may be used by heads or classroom teachers to judge the health of their learning environment. The book sets out to enhance understanding of the components of a healthy learning environment and the tools needed to improve that environment. It also looks at ways to assess the impact of change activities in improving and sustaining educational excellence. The international team of contributors bring perspectives from the school systems in America, UK, Australia and Holland.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Chapter 1
Measuring, Improving and Sustaining Healthy Learning Environments
H.Jerome Freiberg and T.A.Stein
Why is Climate so Important to Learning?
School climate is the heart and soul of a school. It is about that essence of a school that leads a child, a teacher, an administrator, a staff member to love the school and to look forward to being there each school day. School Climate is about that quality of a school that helps each individual feel personal worth, dignity and importance, while simultaneously helping create a sense of belonging to something beyond ourselves. The climate of a school can foster resilience or become a risk factor in the lives of people who work and learn in a place called school.
It is also about a seventh grade class, in an inner-city middle school, who feel the responsibility for their learning that they donât need a teacher to supervise their actions. This is put to the test when their teacher is absent and the substitute did not show. A student journal reflects that day:
When students become citizens of the school, they take responsibility for their actions and those of others. On the October day that Sergio wrote about, a student sent the attendance to the office, while another student reviewed the homework with the class and started classroom presentations scheduled for the day. When the substitute teacher finally arrived, the students were engaged in learning. They had been taking responsibility for the classroom operations since September and, in a sense, were being prepared for this experience. What occurred in the school or classroom before the event to create a climate that said it was all right to take the initiative to learn without an adult being present? What factors support the studentsâ decision to embrace a norm that encourages order rather than chaos, quality of work rather than the prevailing norm for doing the minimum? A program entitled Consistency Management and Cooperative Discipline (CMCD) (see Freiberg, Stein and Huang, 1995; Freiberg, 1996, 1999 for additional explanation of the program) had been in place for two years at the middle school. The CMCD program supported students being citizens of the learning environment rather than touristsâ taking responsibility for their actions and the actions of others. The program changed the existing climate that was controlling and untrusting to one that was supportive and gave students opportunities for experiencing the skills necessary for self-discipline.
Climate as Metaphor
If I say âSchool climate, what is the first word that comes to your mind?â the usual word association from educators is âfeelâ, âwell-beingâ, âhealthâ, âlearning environmentâ, âsafetyâ, (both physical and psychological) âopennessâ, and âcaringâ within schools and classrooms. On the Internet searching the term âschool climateâ brings over five million matches. Narrowing those down with greater detail in the search will provide more than 145 sites that relate directly to the topics presented in this book. The number of sites has tripled in the last few years. When defining the climate of a school we tend to use metaphors similar to the descriptions listed above. A school is not an organic being in the biological sense but it does have the qualities of a living organism in the organizational and cultural sense. The physical structure of schools can have direct influences on the health of individuals who work and learn there. The amount of light, noise, chemicals, and air quality are part of most work environmentsâschools are no different. Beyond the physical nature of schools there are other elements that reflect the way people interact and this interaction produces a social fabric that permeates the working and learning condition.
Climate: Organizational or Cultural?
School Climate: Measuring, Improving and Sustaining Healthy Learning Environments, takes both an organizational climate and cultural view of schools with the former more predominant in the book. Hoy, Tarter and Kottkamp (1991) distinguish between climate and culture in how schools are viewed, with school or organizational climate being viewed from a psychological perspective and school culture viewed from an anthropological perspective. School Climate derives its knowledge from both fields of inquiry. Some authors within the book provide perspective and climate measures that can quantify elements of school organization through validated survey instruments, while other authors examine the school culture and use stories, discussions, cases, student drawings, teacher and student journals, interviews, video and ambient noise check lists to describe what is occurring in schools and classrooms.
National School Climate Report Cards
The issue of school climate has been catapulted to national educational prominence. As the world moves into the information age, then knowledge more than manufacturing becomes the driving force behind educational policies. The chairman of the State Board of Education in Texas described how a two fold increase in oil prices would bring an additional 26 billion dollars into the state. However, if every high school graduate in the state added four years more of education, they would also bring 26 billion dollars into the state. The learning environment of students emerges as a much more significant economic as well as social and educational issue for the new millennium. Moving beyond high school to higher education requires a different learning environment and needs to start very early in a childâs schooling experience. Figure 1.1 shows the ratings and rankings by Education Week (1997) of the schools in each state in the United States. They used class size, ratio of pupils to teachers in secondary schools, school organization and school safety as criteria for giving a grade from A to F on how positive the climate was. Of the larger states, Texas with a score of 78 was ranked in the top six of all states, with California being ranked near the bottom with a score of 62. The state with schools with the best climate was Vermont (87) and the worst was Utah (61). Teacher Magazine (1998) reported another climate âreport cardâ using class size and student engagement (student absenteeism, tardiness, and classroom misbehavior) criteria. Maine scored at the top of this list with a score of 81, Vermont was fifth with a score of 77. Texas was given a score of 75 and California a âfailingâ grade of 51. No state received a score of 90 or better in either report card.
State Policy and School Climate
Many of the factors identified by the two report cards (class size and teacher/ student ratios) are beyond the control of many local schools as they are determined by state policy based on per pupil funding. Policy and funding issues at the state level can influence the climate of schools at the local level. Texas in the late 1980s, for example, began to âroll-outâ reductions in class size to 22:1, beginning at the kindergarten and first grade levels (5â6 year olds) and expanded this reduction in class size each year until grade four (10â11 year olds). After a decade of smaller classes, changes in class size which occurred over several years, allowed for the orderly hiring of teachers and building of additional classrooms. In 1998, California which has suffered under nominal support for schools owing to taxing limitations, mandated a reduction in class size in one year. It will take several years to make the transition in construction and hiring from large classes (35â40 students) to smaller, 22 students per class. The change in California also comes at a time when demographics of an ageing teaching profession are resulting in higher levels of retirements, resulting in shortages of teachers. This problem will only grow, as it is estimated by the US Department of Education that nearly two million new teachers will be needed in the United States during the next fifteen years. This problem is not unique to the United States. The ageing teaching population throughout Europe and Japan will result in a transformation of the teaching profession. The climate of a school may be affected by many factors.
Research on School Climate
During the last twenty years there has been extensive research on identifying the factors that comprise the quality of a school (see Brookover, Beady, Flood, Schweitzer and Weisenbaker, 1979; Rutter, Maughan, Mortimore, Ouston and Smith, 1979; Lightfoot, 1983; Hoy, Tarter and Kottkamp, 1991; Teddlie and Stringfield, 1993; Rogers and Freiberg, 1994; Fashola and Slavin, 1998). The research has been guided by many different voices. These range from talking about schools as if they were akin to factories, identifying the characteristics of the inputs necessary to obtain the desired outputs, to talking about schools as if they were akin to families, stressing the dynamics of caring which ground the kind of positive familial relationships which lead to healthy growth.
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Measuring, Improving and Sustaining Healthy Learning Environments
- Chapter 2: The Role of School and Classroom Climate In Elementary School Learning Environments
- Chapter 3: Using Informal and Formal Measures to Create Classroom Profiles
- Chapter 4: Using Learning Environment Assessments to Improve Classroom and School Climates
- Chapter 5: Organizational Health Profiles for High Schools
- Chapter 6: Organizational Climate and Teacher Professionalism: Identifying Teacher Work Environment Dimensions
- Chapter 7: Perceptions of Parents and Community Members As a Measure of School Climate
- Chapter 8: The Teachersâ Lounge and Its Role In Improving Learning Environments In Schools
- Chapter 9: The Impact of Principal Change Facilitator Style On School and Classroom Culture
- Chapter 10: The Phoenix Rises from Its Ashes Doesnât It?
- Chapter 11: Three Creative Ways to Measure School Climate and Next Steps
- Notes On Contributors