Esprit (School Climate)

Esprit or school climate can be defined as a set of internal organizational characteristics that captures the distinctive tone or atmosphere of a school. School climate is unique within each school district and building and can influence the behavior of organizational members. Climate has been described as a relatively enduring quality that is experienced by participants and describes and affects their collective perceptions of behavior. Educational researchers believe that school climate influences member behavior and attitudes and makes a difference in the learning environment of schools and the achievement of students. However, despite the seeming importance of school climate, the influence of school climate is typically loosely defined and consequently is often merely a slogan rather than a carefully defined and meaningful construct. School culture and school climate have often been topics with overlapping definitions; however, some describe culture as a set of shared assumptions, values, or norms, and climate as shared perceptions of behavior. Shared assumptions (culture) and shared perceptions (climate) are similar to one another and are linked, but they are subtly [Page 353]different from one another in important ways. Research in school climate, unlike school culture, has been directed toward the development of instruments to measure school climate, and as such has led to the development of three main perspectives that allow school researchers and reformers to analyze, understand, and change the environment within their schools. These perspectives include open to closed teacher-principal behaviors, healthy and unhealthy climate framework, and custodial to humanistic pupilcontrol orientation.

Open to closed teacher-principal behaviors was a pioneering 1962 study developed by Andrew Halpin and Don Croft that led to the development of an instrument that measures important aspects of teacherteacher and teacher-principal interaction. The revised Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ-RE) is a 42-item measure describing the behavior of elementary teachers and principals. In this model, principal behavior can be supportive, directive, or restrictive, with teacher behaviors being collegial, intimate, or disengaged. Combinations of these six behaviors determine whether a school climate is considered open, engaged, disengaged, or closed.

The organizational health is another framework used to conceptualize the general climate of a school. Based on the idea that all social systems must satisfy basic problems of adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency, the Organizational Health Inventory (OHI) was developed in 1999 by Wayne Hoy and Jay Feldman. The OHI defines seven specific interaction patterns in schools at the institutional, managerial, and technical levels, which are institutional integrity, principal influence, consideration, initiating structure, resource support, morale, and academic emphasis. While developing a healthy climate, elementary, middle, and high schools differ; with the latter being more complex.

Another way to measure school climate is in terms of patterns that teachers and principals use to control students. Willard Waller developed a pupil-control continuum in 1932 from custodial to humanistic; in other words, from rigid and highly controlled to cooperative. The instrument developed from this model is called the Pupil-Control Ideology (PCI) form, a 20-item scale with five response categories.

While research has connected positive climate to more satisfaction among teachers and students, the influences of a healthy climate on student achievement gains is less common, although recent studies support a connection between affective climate measures and student performance.

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