Assessing Your School Climate

Instructions

Introduction

Stereotypes and biases can arise in various relationships and arenas within the school community. For example:

• Between teachers and other teachers, non-teaching staff, administrators, students, or students’ guardians
• Between non-teaching staff and other non-teaching staff, teachers, administrators, students, or students’ guardians
• Between students’ guardians and other guardians, non-teaching staff, teachers, administrators, or students
• Between students and other students, students’ guardians, non-teaching staff, teachers, or administrators
• Toward certain groups within the curriculum
• Toward certain groups within school policies and administration

This practice can help identify where such stereotypes and bias might arise, how they might impact members of the school community, and what we might do to mitigate against potential harm.

Procedure

• Over the course of a school week, take some time to observe the school environment. For example, you might consider reading and analyzing school policies/curriculum more closely, observing students during lunch or recess, observing teachers in the teachers’ lounge, etc. Through your observations, try to identify where biases and/or stereotypes exist within your school community.
  • Focus your observations on one area of bias (a few examples include: gender, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, culture/nationality, language).
• Review these examples, then write your observations using the same framework. (You can use this Observation and Reflection worksheet to write your responses, or write your responses in a journal or notebook.) Note that you may not fill out every question for each area that you look at.
• Then finish this exercise by completing the reflection questions on the same worksheet or in your journal/notebook.

Source

Empatico: Empatico is a social-emotional learning platform, connecting students with themselves, each other, and the world through interactive and globally collaborative classroom tools.

Evidence That It Works

Across seven studies (1,504 students from the University of Kansas), researchers found that social norms influenced participants’ own expressions of prejudice. For example, when social norms made prejudice towards a particular group seem more acceptable, participants adhered to those norms when expressing prejudice, evaluating scenarios of discrimination, and reacting to hostile jokes. Thus, evaluating norms is essential for ensuring that the norms are supporting the fair treatment of all community members.

Furthermore, research has found that we are more likely to engage in a behavior when we form a plan ahead of time, i.e., if-then statements. For example, in a study of 287,228 U.S. citizens, the voters who were encouraged to create a voting plan (versus simply being encouraged to vote and/or asking if they intended to vote) increased voter turnout by 9.1 percent.

Why Does It Matter?

Despite educators’ best intentions, biases can creep into the school community in many ways. Such biases might signal to students that prejudice is tolerated, creating hostile environments in which traditionally stigmatized students feel unwelcome and/or have to face discriminatory behavior.

In order to address such biases, one has to first notice them and then create a plan for remedying the biases. Reflecting on how such biases might be experienced by students can also help teachers to identify and change their own implicit biases, fostering more empathy for students as well as creating more positive outcomes for them.