The improvement of student achievement is partly influenced by the school climate. School climate is thequality and character of school life and identifies four major aspects: safety, teaching and learning, relationships, and environmentIn order to improve the school climate educational managers and educators must consider the following:
Safety
In order to make the school a safe place to stay and to study, the school leader, teachers and personnel must adhere to the practices that support safety. There should be a positive school-wide program that sets the rules and provides consistent enforcement, clearly communicated rules for various areas. Moreover, there should be guidelines for adult intervention and clearly communicated policies for classroom behavior.
In achieving safety, the keys are communication and consistency. Rules must be taught explicitly to both students and teachers. Teachers must be the models of appropriate behavior and must be the initiators of desirable behaviorsand actions for the safety ways to protect lives and properties. For sure a positive climate will be achieved.
Teaching and Learning
Students are willing to learn if the teacher will use supportive practices like attending to individual student needs, utilizing errors and incorrect answers as opportunities to learn and teach – not to serve as correction and disgrace, providing advice, offering commendation for hard work and maintaining high beliefs for every student/pupil.
Teachers must also offer a variety of choices to students throughout the instructional sessions. Teachers can address student strengths, learning styles, interests and multiple intelligences by creating lessons with a choice of approaches or end products.
Relationships
The teacher must primarily establish a good relationship with his/her students or pupils. Teachers must serve as the second parents of the learners. Teachers must interact very well with the students and must deal with them with harmony.
Environment
The physical surroundings must be appealing to the learners. The school must be clean, the facilities are well-maintained and all the areas must be conducive to learning.
We must keep in mind that our school climate is the reflection of the people in the educational institution.
By: Evangeline Cruz Francisco | Teacher III | Kaparangan Elementary School | Orani, Bataan
