Improving School Climate

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.

Build a positive school climate to impact students, teachers, and the community! Is improving school climate on your to-do list? Do you think about it as a top-down directive or as a dialogue to build equity within the school? A healthy school environment should never be seen as an option, but instead supported as a must-have. Peter DeWitt offers leaders practical high impact strategies to improve school climate, deepen involvement in student learning, and engage a broader family network. In addition to international vignettes focused on community stakeholders and research-based practices, this book features tools such as · a leadership growth cycle to help leaders build their self-efficacy · a teacher observation cycle centered on building collective efficacy · an early warning system to identify potential at-risk students · action steps following each chapter to apply to your own setting · discussion questions for use in team environments Establishing a supportive and inclusive school climate where professionals can take risks to improve the lives of students is vital to maximize learning in any school community.

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.

The authors provide a collaborative action research process to help all stakeholders transform both their school climate and student learning. Includes success stories, strategies, and implementation activities.

The authors connect the teens' technology use to the school environment and provide tools (including a companion website) for creating a positive school climate that counteracts cyberbullying and sexting.

Many people have become impatient with school reform and school improvement efforts that fail to include school climate. The importance of a positive school climate is emerging in current research, not only as an essential component of school reform and school improvement, but also as a necessary framework for maintaining excellent schools and providing healthy and safe schools for all students. Research strongly suggests that educators and policy makers have a lot to learn about the importance of school climate for school safety and academic success. With the growing body of research regarding school climate, it is important to study the research and understand how the psychology of school climate and how the elements of school climate can be viewed from a population-based perspective, as well as understanding the impact of school climate on individual students. This review of school climate research includes hundreds of articles and research papers of different perspectives from around the world in numerous cultures. School climate is becoming a science of education and psychology that must be studied further in order to understand the dynamic nature of learning environments, to identify elements that support or threaten the learning environment, and to learn how to improve the conditions for learning in all schools.

"This handbook is the first definitive source on character education, social-emotional learning, and school climate improvement. Each chapter includes discussion of practices and models of education as well as theory and research that grounds these approaches. Case studies add the voices and insights of practitioners with experience in adopting, implementing, and evaluating prosocial education school reform strategies"--

Busy administrators will appreciate this quick read packed with immediate, accessible strategies. This book provides the framework for understanding dynamic relationships within a school culture and ensuring a positive environment that supports the changes necessary to improve learning for all students. The author explores many aspects of human behavior, social conditions, and history to reveal best practices for building healthy school cultures.