School climate

School climate is to learning as soil quality and climate are to gardening. They need to be monitored and leveraged to best advantage.  The Ripple Effects web based, School Safety Profiler and Respect for Persons Profiler, provide quick and easy measures of school climate from staff and student perspectives. Ripple Effects directly addresses the issue of school climate, from teacher, student and administrator perspectives. In his meta analysis of school climate research, David Osher of AIR has identified four key factors in school climate: safety, challenge/expectations, personal relations and meaningful engagement. Ripple Effects addresses all of these at both staff and student levels.

Personal safety

Personal safety issues for students including bullying, threats, presence of drugs and alcohol, and availability of weapons. Safety training for teachers includes having a crisis response plan in place, and knowing how to deal with threats, but also developing the kind of positive personal relations that reduce the probability of violence, and creating an emotionally safe and nurturing classroom environment, where students are protected from ridicule and can learn from mistakes.

Expectations

Tutorials for both students (“success-phobia) and staff address expectations for student success, with a special focus on deconstructing class and ethnicity-based, lowered expectations from both teacher and student directions. The professional development program provides training in how to set and support positive behavioral expectations, as well as academic ones

Adult-student relationships

Personal relations are also addressed from both directions, with both students and teachers developing core social-emotional abilities that promote positive relationships, especially empathy, problem-solving and communication skills (Teacher-student conflict is one of the most commonly selected tutorials in the program.)

Meaningful engagement

The most meaningful engagement possible is built right into the program.  The subject of all study is learners’ own lives and experience. The instructional methods for approaching that study include 9-13 differentiated, multi-media based, constructivist and instructivist approaches for every tutorial. EAch student chooses the ones that are the best fit, with the caveat that all students must complete the interactive exercises that measure comprehension (and in many cases, application) of the key concepts.

Every teacher in every classroom faces behavior problems ...

So do the students 

Off-task, disruptive and defiant behavior, and loss of instructional time due to them, are problems for every teacher, in every discipline, in every classroom. They are also problems for students, both those engaged in the behavior and those who are robbed of instruction time because of it. Individual tutorials provide teachers with coaching in how recognize and respond to the social-emotional and cultural factors that are at the root of many behavior problems. It address classroom management issues, and offers specific opportunities to transfer these skills to language arts, math, advisory, and sports education settings.

The student software provides individualized, skill training to address the presenting problem behavior, as well as the opportunity to privately explore what each students believes is the underlying, personal reason for that behavior.  

Resources to support school wide use

The Ripple Effects Whole Spectrum Intervention System, includes a broad array of print and electronic resources to support a climate where every student is expected to succeed and supported toward that success. Print and electronic versions of Ripple Effects Personal Trainer for Parents are included with the software package.