Supportive School Environment

7017CTL

Yan Chen

I. Definition
According to Muijs and Reynolds (2001), “classroom climate is quite a wide-ranging
concept including the mood or atmosphere that is created in the teacher’s classroom
through the rules set out, the way the teacher interacts with pupils, and the way the
physical environment is set out.” It plays a major role in shaping the quality of school
life and learning. Therefore, a highly effective teacher should seek to develop a
positive classroom climate for his/her students.

II. Implementing a positive classroom climate

When seeking to foster an appropriate classroom climate, the important matters
teachers should concern is the characteristics of classroom life, such as cohesiveness,
diversity, formality, speed, material environment, friction, goal direction, favoritism,
difficulty, apathy, democracy, cliqueness, satisfaction, disorganization, and
competitiveness (Barry & King, 1998). What’s more, research has shown one of the
main elements in developing a positive classroom climate is creating a warm,
supportive environment in which students feel capable, included, secure and
unthreatened (Jacobsen, Eggen & Kauchak, 2006). Therefore, students would like to
make a positive contribution to the lesson. Besides, the enthusiasm of the teacher is
another important factor.

In order to be highly effective teachers, all teachers should recognize that the key
elements such as motivation, competition, expectations, leadership, attraction, norms,
communication, cohesiveness, grouping, classroom management, classroom rules,
learning environment and needs are of great importance to establish a positive
classroom climate (Barry & King, 1998).

A. Elements of classroom climate

Classroom achievement motivation:

Most educators strongly believe that students are motivated to make progress in their
learning and achievement. Just as the sentence summarized “You can lead a horse to
water but you can not make it drink.” The concept of achievement motivation is
critical to effective teaching (Barry & King, 1998). In a positive classroom, it is of
great importance for teachers to know how to motivate their students to learn (Nelson
& DeBacker, 2008).

Competitive classroom:
According to the research, competition can motivate students. Students should be
encouraged to compete with one another. Hence, in order to enhance students’
achievement, a highly effective teacher may create a competitive learning
environment in his/her class (Fox, 2005).

Leadership:
The quality of leadership is mainly based on the perceptions of students. Usually,
students would more likely to respect and appreciate the teacher’s leadership, if they
found the teacher is a more experienced, knowledgeable, order, and hopefully wiser
person. According to Barry and King (1998), they believed that “a teacher, as a leader,
who is respected and appreciate by students will be able to achieve a great deal more
in a much more harmonious climate than the teacher who is less respected and
appreciated.” Thus, teachers should try their best to be respected and appreciated.

Attraction:
The attraction patterns of liking and disliking which prevail in any class group are
related to patterns of student leadership. It is well known that peer group has great
power in classroom. Therefore, the effective teacher could make use of the power in
the organizational and instructional fields of classroom life rather than seeking to
inhabit or control the influence of peer group forces (Barry & King, 1998).

Norms:
According to Barry and King (1998), classroom norms are the ongoing expectations
and attitudes which are shared by classroom members, may have a good or bad impact
on the class. However, effective teachers could recognize the existence of the different
kinds of norms, and try their best to exploit them where possible or change those
which seem to have a bad influence on a classroom.

Communication:
Communication in the classroom is a key aspect of classroom life given the
significance of passing information and transferring meanings from one person to
another (Barry & King, 1998). The highly effective teachers should also pay more
attention to the non-verbal movements, gestures and facial expressions. Research
suggests that students are more likely to listen to a teacher who is facing them,
making eye contact. According to Middleton (1981), he suggests that teacher’s
posture, body position, location in the room, use of eye contact, gestures, and facial
expressions provide students with an indication of the degree to which teachers are in
control, care for them, and except to be taken seriously. Thus, teachers should get in
the habit of facing and making eye contact with students to whom they are speaking.
When addressing the entire class, move eyes about the room, making eye contact with
one student. When addressing only one or two students at a time, body positioning
can be used to clearly indicate to whom teacher’s message is intended (Cangelosi,
1992).

Cohesion:
A cohesive class is linked clearly to higher level of student academic achievement.
Effective teacher strive toward the open discussions of expectations, dispersed
leadership (Barry & King, 1998).

Grouping:
According to Bert (1994), he emphasised that effective instructional grouping is an
important concern in meeting the individual needs of diverse students in different
kinds of classrooms. Whole class or large group instruction can benefit students with
diverse learning needs from both and academic and a social standpoint. Teacher–led
small group instruction may be used to provide more intensive contact between the
teacher and a particular group of students. One–to–one instruction can be carried out
by students working individually directly with a teacher, a classroom aide, or with an
interactive computer program. Thus, a highly effective teacher would follow these
group instructions in his/her class.

Classroom rule:
Teachers typically have their own set of rules for how students are to conduct
themselves in the classroom. It is easy for teachers to operate classroom if students
could comprehend the rules and understand the positively reinforced for following
them, and suffer consequences for violating them. Thus, teachers need to teach
students about rules and procedures just as they do to teach them about academic
content. The time they spend explaining and demonstrating rules and routine
procedures will results in time saved because students will spend more time on task
and transitions will be more efficient (Churton & Blair, 1998).

Classroom’s physical setting:

According to Roth (1997), he believed that students could have a positive impression
of the room and of the activities they have done in the room by changing the setting of
the room and make it a favorite place to study.

Learning environment:
Most teachers spent most of their time and effort on passing subject information to
students. Although the subject information is quite important, teacher should place
more emphasis on teaching attitudes and intrinsic values as well. As a teacher, he/she
should also concern about the learning climate or atmosphere in the classroom. In a
positive classroom climate, students could be positive, sensitive, considerate, polite,
and tolerant. Every one could find their experiences to be very positive and rewarding.
Teacher could try to make his/her classroom a place where students and teacher are
happy and helpful (Kincheloe, 2005).

Interaction:
According to Roth (1997), the key to having a good learning environment in the
classroom is to work with small groups or on a one-to-one basis. When interacting
with students, it is important to recognize individual differences, learn names, and
arrange the seating where all students are angled to receive instruction, establish
expectations immediately, make teacher available to students and encourage students
to achieve positively.

Needs:
Teachers, who are concerned with pupils’ emotional and social needs, as well as
academic needs, have been found to make more pupil involvement in lessons.
Research has also pointed to the role of classroom climate in encouraging pupils with
problems to request help. Often it can be the case that it is precisely those pupils who
need help most who are most reluctant to request it, the most able pupils having been
found to be the most likely to request help (James, 2004). However, research has
found that this gap can be reduced if not closed by teachers who value the emotional
needs of their pupils and create a warm and not overly competitive environment.

 Physical needs
According to Lovegrove and Lewis (1991), misbehavior of most students results from
the failure of teachers and schools to fulfill their needs. He believed that students want
to experience success, they want to have feelings of self-worth, and they want to
learn. Before people expect a child to learn, the physical needs such as food, clothing,
shelter, and safety must be met.

 Mental needs:
In addition to these physical needs, humans have mental needs that must be met in
order for them to be happy, emotionally healthy, successful people. These needs must
be met in a way that does not harm anyone else. There are four basic mental needs:
love, or the need for belonging, power to be in control of people’s own lives, fun, and
freedom. Freedom in terms of the classroom is giving students the chance to make
choices about assignments and other lesson planning as well as to help make decisions
about the classroom (Edwards, 2004). Thus, by working to fulfill these needs, the
teacher is applying the idea of a positive classroom climate because it is helping the
students met their full learning potential. To leave any need unmet would be making
the classroom experience a negative one for students.

B. Positive attributes of a good teacher:

Obliviously, teacher is an important component of any classroom. In order to make
the classroom atmosphere conducive to quality learning, a good teacher should have
the following attributes:

Concern
Teacher could make all students know that he/she is interested in them as individuals
and care about their performance. The teacher’s goal is to make this concern permeate
all aspects of his/her teaching. The students will know that teacher cares by the way
he/she teaches and by his/her interaction with them outside classroom (Roth, 1997).

Creativity
Another key component of excellent teaching is creativity, which breaks routines and
makes communication much more effective (Roth, 1997).

Role modeling
Students want to know their teachers as individuals. It is important for the teacher to
teach them intrinsic values both inside and outside of the classroom. For example,
students need to be taught to work diligently in their courses (Roth, 1997).

In short, in a positive classroom, students support each other; they share influence
with each other and with the teacher as well; no matter they are regarded as a group or
individual, they highly attracted each other; norms are adopted as a teaching aid to get
academic work finished and individual differences reduced; the conflict is solved
constructively; and people communicate with each other openly. In other words, in
order to reach teacher’s goals, students are strongly motivated. They have feeling of
positive self-esteem, relaxed feelings of security, and agreeable feelings of being
influential with the teacher and other students. Moreover, they are highly involved in
academic learning. What’s more, in such a positive classroom, a high degree of
attraction to one’s classmates and class can also be found (Barry & King, 1998).

III. The relationship between classroom climate and behavior management

Obliviously, most elements (such as classroom discipline, grouping, classroom

management, interaction, motivation, leadership, communication) of establishing
positive classroom climate have close relationship with teacher’s classroom behavior,
namely, the relationship skills, managerial skills and instructional skills, which tend to
fuse together into teacher classroom action because teachers control a great deal the
development of a particular classroom climate, and know and understand about
promoting a particular classroom climate (Al-Hamdan, 2007). In order to be effective
teachers, all teachers will need to acknowledge those behaviors, especially the
relationship skills which are pivotal to effective teaching and learning (Barry & King,
1998). They help students to learn, keeping control, and maintaining an overall fine
classroom learning atmosphere.

Teacher, as a facilitator, provides students a safe and well-organized classroom

because children spend most of their time in the classroom to acquire knowledge.
Therefore school life is one of the primary influences of every student. Effective
behavior management by a teacher contributes to an efficient and positive learning
environment for children by reducing the frequency misbehavior in the long term and
less needed time in stopping disruptions. Thus, teacher and students should both share
responsibility of a classroom due to the fact that teacher and students are members of
a small community (Ayers, & Gray, 1998).

Teacher is the major cause of what happens in any classroom and this applies to what
is learned as well as the kind and level of pupil behavior. According to Barry and King
(1998), they believe that a teacher’s relation behaviors can all reflect on the quality
and quantity of teacher contact with every student in the classroom. Likewise, a
teacher’s managerial behaviors reflect on the effective and profitable use of time by
pupils. Finally, the quality and quantity of learning which actually occurs reflect a
teacher’s instructional behaviors in the setting and carrying through of appropriate
academic work tasks.
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