Assessing and improving school climate

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Abstract
Past work on psychosocial environments can be divided usefully into research involving students’ perceptions of their classroom‐level environment and studies of teachers’ perceptions of their school‐level environment. Of several instruments for assessing school environment, Moos's Work Environment Scale (WES) is unique in its focus on the school as a work setting and it has considerable potential for use with teachers despite the fact that it was designed initially for any work milieu. Its ten dimensions of Involvement, Peer Cohesion, Staff Support, Autonomy, Task Orientation, Work Pressure, Clarity, Control, Innovation, and Physical Comfort seem quite well‐suited to describing salient features of the school‐teacher's work environment. Administration of a slightly re‐worded version of the WES to a large sample of teachers responding to both an actual form (N=599) and a preferred form (N=543) attested to the internal consistency reliability and discriminant validity of both forms with either the individual teacher or the school mean as the unit of analysis. As well, each scale in the actual form differentiated significantly between the perceptions of teachers in different schools. As part of a teacher development initiative, teachers were introduced to the WES and encouraged to use it in their schools to guide attempts to improve school environment. In schools in which change had been attempted, follow‐up work generally revealed success in improving school environment along those dimensions on which change was intended. A description of one school's successful attempt at improving school environment is provided as a case study.