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A new school year brings new opportunities to ensure students feel safe from harassment and experience a sense of belonging in schools. As educators who have held multiple positions in diverse public and independent schools over long careers, we write here to offer suggestions to foster and support caring and respectful school climates.

Building a Caring School Climate

The tone set by the school leader affects an entire school, whereas teachers primarily influence their own classrooms and activity groups. To promote a climate conducive to safety, belonging, and care, a principal must lead with empathy and develop and apply positive social skills in their interactions with teachers, staff, and students. This type of leadership, along with intentional yet benign vigilance—more focused on empathy than suspicion—can deter or help eradicate bullying and harassment. According to the website of the National Center on Safe, Supportive Learning Environments, a positive school climate is the product of a school’s attention and commitment to fostering safety and encouraging and maintaining respectful, trusting, and caring relationships.

Leading With Empathy

A key ingredient for leading with empathy is high emotional intelligence. In our years of working with school leaders, we have observed that leaders most adept at building rapport with students, teachers, staff, and community are also notably effective at moving these stakeholders in desired strategic directions. These leaders consider diverse perspectives and understand other people’s feelings, especially when making decisions.

Social and emotional skills also need to be fostered in students to help them build both self- and social awareness that enables them to recognize and cope with anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. Students must have meaningful relationships with their peers, their teachers, and their principal, and these relationships must contain space for students to express both concerns and joys. Otherwise, students may feel alone and even unseen by adults in roles designed to be supportive and protective—especially in situations where being known and seen can make the difference between growth and alienation. The principal needs to assess the climate of the school to identify general trends and even specific spaces and situations in which students may be having negative experiences, including harassment or bullying.

Assessing School Culture

One tool a principal can use to assess school climate is the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (CSCI), administered by the National School Climate Center. The CSCI gathers data from students, staff, and families on 14 dimensions of school climate to offer a panoramic vista of both climate and culture:

  • Rules and Norms
  • Sense of Physical Security
  • Sense of Social-Emotional Security
  • Online Safety
  • Support for Academic Learning
  • Social and Emotional Learning
  • Respect for Diversity
  • Teacher-Student Relationships
  • Peer Relationships
  • School Connectedness
  • Physical Surroundings
  • Social Inclusion
  • Administration and Leadership
  • Collective Efficacy

Another tool for developing useful and actionable data on school climate and culture is the High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE), created and administered by Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy. In partnership with the National Association of Independent Schools, the university has separately aggregated survey results from independent schools for some years now. The university also administers a separate Middle Grades Survey of Student Engagement (MGSSE). As described by NAIS, the HSSSE measures responses from individual students to produce data on:

  • “Cognitive/intellectual/academic engagement: Describes students’ efforts, investment, and strategies for learning—the work students do, and the ways students go about their work.”
  • “Social/behavioral/participatory engagement: Captures students’ actions in social, extracurricular, and nonacademic school activities, including interactions with other students—the ways in which students interact within the school community.”
  • “Emotional engagement: Emphasizes students’ feelings of connection (or disconnection) to their school—how students feel about where they are in school, the ways and workings of the school, and the people within their school.”

We believe that climate and engagement surveys such as these can very much help school leaders in identifying problematic areas where students may not be experiencing the kinds of supportive, authentic relationships with staff and peers that lead to feelings of security and belonging. They are useful, if not essential, tools for creating more positive and effective schools and learning environments.

Leadership Behaviors to Strengthen School Climate

Phyllis Gimbel. PHOTOS COURTESY OF PHYLLIS GIMBEL

For leaders at the top—principals, school heads, division directors, and the like—leading with empathy can engender schoolwide cultures of purpose and respect. These leadership practices can build cultures that prioritize understanding and valuing the experiences and perspectives of others. To that end, we suggest school leaders do the following:

1. Get out of your office. Walk around the school campus as much as possible, especially in the hallways, the cafeteria, the library, the gym, the front steps, and the teachers’ lounge. By being visible, you are showing everyone you care, that you co-exist with everyone in the school. In that way, you can say hello to students and ask their names and even find out who may need some connections with teachers and with other students.

2. When faced with student misbehavior, have a sit-down talk, one-on-one, with the student. This can help you discover whether the student is acting out because they feel uncomfortable in the school. Rather than punish a student for not following the shared vision of being safe, kind, respectful, and responsible, the one-on-one sit-down can bring the principal and the student closer as the leader models empathy and relationship-building to reach the student.

3. Eat lunch with students from time to time. Get acquainted with students and find out what is on their minds. Perhaps you can ascertain by observation or by listening to students’ conversations in the hallways who might be the victims of bullying and harassment. Find out what is stressful for students and what makes them happy.

Peter Gow.

4. Go into classrooms as a non-threatening presence. Make sure teachers know they are not being evaluated when you stop by for short visits to classrooms to show students you are present. This will help inform you which students may be having trouble with learning or with anything else. And, if there are union regulations about spending less than 20 minutes in a classroom, you are not in violation. We were comforted each morning in our early years of teaching when school leaders did campus walkabouts early in the day, stepping into each classroom for a few minutes just as friendly faces. This was the leaders’ way of getting to know every teacher and every student better in the actual context of teaching and learning—a powerful lesson in empathetic leadership.

5. Put a suggestion box outside your office. In addition to conducting a climate survey, put a suggestion box outside your office that invites students and teachers to anonymously share thoughts, opinions, concerns, and ideas. And don’t take negativity personally—use what you learn to shape not just policy but your own perspectives.

6. Laugh. Make sure that both students and staff see you laugh from time to time, when appropriate. The late Norman Lear used to say that “There’s nothing that unites people more or better than laughter.” If you want a happy climate, model it.

7. Offer gifts of time and support. Offer the gift of time to a teacher who may be having some personal issues needing their attention. Cover the teacher’s class, find a substitute and allow the teacher to leave school early or arrive late if need be. When possible, help the teacher find resources to help them cope with the problem.

We also suggest that you not try to be “the people’s pal” when you aren’t. Students and staff alike know when a leader’s behavior is inauthentic or just pandering. Students over the years have told us about times when school leaders act too much like students or are “too nice” to students who “mess up,” pretending to be their friends. Capering in hallways, using slang, and telling jokes that are more appropriate for teenagers are some of the behaviors noted by students that mark an insincere leader. Such behaviors—which quickly reveal themselves as shams when a leader must exercise authority in serious situations—do not foster climates of mutual respect but rather of cynicism and mistrust.

As a principal, or “first” leader, keep foremost in your mind the human qualities and perspectives that made the whole idea of school leadership attractive in the first place. Recall those leaders whose candor, empathy, enthusiasm, and even simple presence have supported you in your journey. Begin each school year, and each day and each week, by considering how best to lead your school community in becoming a place of emotional openness, generosity, and engagement—a place of real and affirming relationships and exciting learning, a place of happiness and purpose.


Phyllis Gimbel is a professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and a former secondary school principal. Peter Gow is emeritus director of independent curriculum resources at One Schoolhouse and a former teacher, college counselor, and academic administrator.