Learning Environments

Every organization, whether educational, political, cultural, industrial, or business related, has a learning environment with its unique culture and climate. Together these create the personality or ethos of the organization. Research on 20 schools found a significant difference in student achievement between schools with a positive or negative climate. Thus, a positive learning environment promotes learning whereas a negative environment is known to deter optimal knowledge obtainment.

Climate can be defined as the social atmosphere of a setting; thus the learning environment in which participants have different experiences, depending upon the protocols wherein they are operating. These learning environments can be divided into three categories:

• 1.
  Relationships, including involvement, support, and affiliation with others
• 2.
  Personal growth or goal orientation, including personal development and self-enhancement of all members of the organization
• 3.
  System maintenance and system change, including the orderliness of the environment, clarity of the rules, and the strictness of the person enforcing them

A learning environment includes, but is not limited to, physical facilities and settings, types of students, school and community characteristics, resource availability, climate, and degrees of support. Research on which issues correlate to learning and student achievement has determined that schools must have a safe and orderly environment, a climate of high expectations for success, strong instructional leadership, a clear and focused mission, an opportunity to learn and have appropriate time on task, frequent monitoring of student progress, and strong home-school relations.

Organizational climate is often used interchangeably with organizational culture. They are closely intertwined and dependent, yet distinct. Culture is the psychological attributes that give an organization its personality, whereas climate is the institutional features that can be seen. An example would be a metaphor of an iceberg itself, whereas climate is the tip of the iceberg itself. Yet it is supported by the underlying value and belief systems and traditions that form the organizational culture. There appear to be six climate variables that are similar to Larry Lezotte's effective schools' correlates. These are instructional leadership, classroom instruction, high expectations, parent and community involvement, a sense of mission, and time on task. In the earlier Lezotte research, a safe and orderly environment is clearly one of the contributing factors to a positive school or organizational climate. The first generation correlate of a safe and orderly environment was defined in terms of the absence of undesirable or negative circumstances. However, in the second generation, the emphasis is on the presence of desirable circumstances. Thus, the emphasis has changed from the presence of positive versus negative factors.

The physical, emotional, and social components of an organization play a large role in the total wellbeing of the learners. This is particularly important within the educational society where more is expected from today's schools than within the last hundred years. Careful consideration must be given to an environment that fosters careful attention to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that learners bring to the educational setting. This includes the instructor possessing sensitivity to the cultural orientation of students and the effect of those perspectives and beliefs on classroom learning. Effective teachers help learners see the reason or purpose for learning by respecting and understanding their former experiences, understandings and assuming that these can serve as a foundation on which to build bridges to new learning.

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