THE EVALUATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL CLIMATE
1. OVERVIEW OF SCHOOL CLIMATE
School climate is an indicator of how the mechanisms that affect all stakeholder’s attitudes, perceptions, behaviours, performances, and ways of relating to each other work in a school. The mechanisms can be grouped under two main headings: Internal Mechanisms and External Mechanisms.
Internal Mechanisms: The internal mechanisms of the school climate consist of elements such as “taking initiative, cooperation, justice, trust, respect, common goal, participation in decision making, relationships, transparency, belonging and motivation”. Internal mechanisms are an indicator of how the main dimensions of the school climate (organizational structure, learning-teaching processes, and social-emotional structure) work in the context of the school climate. The social-emotional structure, which is one of the three main dimensions of school climate, includes the social skills and emotion management processes of the stakeholders in the context of the physical and social conditions in the school, and thus relationships. Organizational structure refers to the institutional activities carried out in order to achieve a common goal within the context of a hierarchy of authority and responsibility. Learning-teaching processes, on the other hand, cover the projections of common goals and activities in the learning and teaching environments, which are set up within the scope of organizational and social-emotional structure. These three main dimensions are a combination of elements such as transparency, belonging, relationships, participation in decision making, cooperation, trust, justice, common goal, motivation and taking initiative.
To create a sustainable and positive school climate, it is important to determine how these internal mechanisms work in the organizational structure, educational processes, social and emotional learning processes.
External Mechanisms: It is a limited-time support or assistance provided from out-of-school resources and individuals, aimed at meeting the needs of school stakeholders, with the purpose of physical improvement and individual/professional competence development
When the internal mechanisms are activated in line with school’s needs, they create improvement areas to develop a more sustainable structure in the school climate. On the other hand, external mechanisms tend to narrow the improvement areas due to their dependence on out-of-school resources and support. Expansion areas created by external mechanisms are only possible by activating internal mechanisms in effective ways. From this point of view, it is important to define the relationship between internal and external mechanisms for creating a sustainable school climate and to develop needs-oriented strategies regarding these mechanisms.
2. SCHOOL CLIMATE MODEL
The School Climate Model has a holistic approach that focuses on the indicators of "quality and character of school life”. From this point of view, the School Climate Model has a process setting that the strengths and weaknesses of the school are determined, and improvement activities are carried out in line with the action plan determined including all stakeholders of the school with a sustainable approach.
The Process Flow of School Climate
The preparation phase, which is the first phase of the implementation process of the School Climate Model, consists of three steps: 1) Training on “School Climate Standards and Implementation”, 2) Informing Stakeholders 3) Establishing School Climate. During the first step, training on “School Climate Standards and Implementation” is given to relevant teachers and administrators. This training helps teachers to find the answers to the questions such as “what school climate is, why school climate is important, which main components it consist of what school climate standards are and how schools evaluate themselves in line with these standards and create a more positive climate”. In the second step, all stakeholders are informed about the concept, standards, and implementation process of the school climate. Finally, “the School Climate Team” is established, which will be responsible for the planning, coordination and facilitation of all activities to improve the school climate. During the second phase, exploration phase, the school is expected to determine its present state and determine its goals. During the third stage, the cooperation/agreement phase, it is expected that the school will prepare an action plan for the determined priorities and share this action plan with all stakeholders. In the implementation phase, the action plan is applied with respect to the priority goals determined in the exploration phase. The monitoring and impact assessment phase starts in the "Preparation Phase" itself and continues until the end of the "Implementation Phase" during the process of evaluating and developing the school climate. Monitoring and impact assessment should be done separately for each phase. When necessary, it gives the opportunity to go back to the beginning at the end of the process and to set goals and make action plans for different areas.
