Students Best Positioned To Improve School Climate
The complex set of factors that influence school climate can be arranged into five groups or determinants:
- Community factors: The values, beliefs, and practices that are evident outside the walls of school and home, particularly the value a community places on its children and youth and how they invest time and resources to support youth development.
- Family factors: The values, beliefs, and practices that are instilled and reinforced in children by parents and other relatives, especially regarding how to behave with adults in authority and peers and what value is placed on education, tolerance, communication, and nonviolence.
- Organizational factors: The values, beliefs, and practices demonstrated by a school’s policies, lines of and access to communication and authority, opportunities to participate in decision making, size, physical layout, adult-student ratio, class size, and number of students, among others.
- Staff factors: The values, beliefs, and practices demonstrated by the ways school staff relate to each other and to students, their classroom management and discipline practices, and the priority individual staff place on building and strengthening relationships.
- Student factors: The values, beliefs, and practices that are demonstrated by how students relate to one another and to adults in authority, how they prioritize education relative to other experiences in their lives, their attitudes toward acquiring and building relationship skills like communication and conflict resolution, and how their behaviors and choices are influenced by the other four factors.
These determinants provide educational leaders with a framework for analyzing current and potential strategies to build and maintain a positive school climate. But too often adults overlook the most powerful leverage point they have: their students. As the Safe School Ambassadors program has shown, they are typically the ones best positioned to influence the school climate, and can do so in a positive way if they are engaged, empowered, and equipped with the right skills.
Before developing a school climate improvement plan, it is wise to assess your current school climate. There are several ways to get an accurate assessment. Many states require regular surveys (e.g. the California Healthy Kids Survey) and the results are usually made public; contact your principal, superintendent, county office of education or regional educational service center for more information. Community Matters has developed a Climate Survey that can be downloaded free of charge.
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