School Climate Response Paper

Because of the resistance to even something I saw as relatively simple – like implementing the School Climate Questionnaire and the Social Boundary Mapping – I was not able to implement any of the future program ideas I’d originally come up with at Independent School of Long Beach during this semester. But I do have examples of them being implemented in peer-reviewed professional journal articles in other school settings and I want to show those so that readers can see the impact that these resources can potentially have on teachers, students, and school communities. Narvaez, Bock, Endicott, and Lies (2004) implemented the School Climate Questionnaire and found that students had a higher perception of safety in their school climate in regards to the teachers and staff making the school more welcoming, but they had many more incidents of …show more content…
Regardless, students’ and teachers’ perceptions were different, thus, this is a great example of how this tool can be used to expose differences in teachers’ and students’ perceptions. Willems (2013) also measured students’ perceptions and teachers’ self-ratings of modeling civic virtues. Willems (2013) found that although teachers and their students generally felt like they displayed models of justice and solidarity well, that student ratings of the virtue of tolerance was less evident than how teachers viewed themselves. Conclusions correlate with what I’m suggesting here, “it could be helpful to train teachers to become aware of, reflect on and eventually improve their modeling behavior by means of student questionnaires” (p. 106). Both of these studies reveal that students’ and teachers’ perceptions of school climate are very different. Questionnaires like the School Climate Questionnaire provided here can be critical tools in beginning conversations about school climate, clarifying exactly what is meant by school climate, and beginning important discussions about what teachers and students view similarly and