Course Climate
The classroom environment we create can profoundly affect students’ learning, positively or negatively
By Michele DiPietro
As educators, we are primarily concerned that students acquire sound content and valuable skills, but those processes do not happen in a vacuum. Learning is a social process, and the context in which learning happens frees up or limits the learning that can happen.
The seventh principle of learning concerns our course climate. As educators, we are
primarily concerned that students acquire sound content and valuable skills, but those
processes do not happen in a vacuum. Learning is a social process, and the context
in which learning happens frees up or limits the learning that can happen. Many of
us can point back to courses we took as students where the instructor involved us
more, and made us feel like we mattered and they were invested in our learning experience.
And still many can point to courses where the opposite happened. Research shows that
these differences matter, not just in how we feel about those courses and how fondly
we look back on them, but in terms of learning. For instance, perceptions of a “chilly”
climate affect student learning, critical thinking, and preparation for a career (Pascarella
et al. 1997; Whitt et al 1999).
A continuum of environments
DeSurra and Church (1994) offer an insightful way to look at our course climate, asking
whether it centralizes or marginalizes student perspectives, and whether it does so
implicitly or explicitly. That creates a continuum of environments, from Explicitly
Marginalizing to Implicitly Marginalizing, to Implicitly Centralizing, to Explicitly
Centralizing. That means, unless we are at the most centralizing end of the continuum,
all of us can take steps to make our climate more conducive to learning.
They also found that on average, instructors do not have an accurate sense of how
students feel about their courses. In their study, faculty scored themselves rather
high on that continuum, but their students rated them at a consistently lower level.
This is a great reminder to check the perceptions of the climate in our courses. While
we don’t have an exhaustive taxonomy of all the elements that contribute to the climate
of a course, the research has strong findings on several, listed below.
Belonging
A feeling of belonging to one’s environment is a crucial element of a positive climate
and a strong determinant of learning. If students feel they don’t belong, they are
outsiders, that immediately means they must be on guard in an environment that they
don’t recognize as watching out for them. Their mental energies get diverted from
learning to self-protection. A particular aspect of not belonging is that of stereotype
threat. One surefire way of causing students to not feel like they belong is to treat
them based on commonplace stereotypes about their identity. The effect of stereotyping
people on learning and performance are well documented. It could be according to gender,
race, sexuality, religion, but it goes beyond the usual social categories to any groups
(e.g., sororities, athletes). The good news from this research is that it is not hard
to make all students feel like they belong if we are intentional about it.
Tone
Another element that contributes to climate is the tome of our communications, for
instance of our policies. Regardless of the content of the policy, if we communicate
it with a negative tone, emphasizing transgressions and punishment, it will have a
chilling effect on our students. If we communicate the same policy using an encouraging
tone, focusing on the reasons and the value of the policy and on our belief that students
have the capacity to perform well within the guardrails set by the policy, this will
have a positive effect on students’ perceptions of our approachability and on their
willingness to seek help from us when they need it.
Content
Content also works to create climate. Because we can’t cover everything in our courses
and we have to make decisions about what to keep and what to cut, what we do include
communicates which perspectives are valued. Which authors are included in your syllabus?
Which examples illustrate key points? What perspectives are privileged? As students
navigate our content, they are reading and listening for comprehension, but also to
answer these questions, and ultimately if their presence is seen in our courses.
Presence and Immediacy
Online courses can be especially challenging in this regard, without the physical
closeness of sitting next to each other, doing group work in class, and so on. Therefore
it is especially important that us instructors find ways to build presence in the
online course. Research shows that a strong sense of presence correlates with student
satisfaction in an online course as well as with perceptions of their own learning.
Presence is an umbrella term that has many facets. It refers to social presence, pedagogical
presence, and cognitive presence. The social aspect includes building connections
and trust among all members of an online community. The pedagogical aspect pertains
to building a cohesive learning experience with the sense that the instructor is a
strong guiding presence at the helm. And the cognitive presence refers to building
student engagement in the course. The point is to build immediacy, that is, to reduce
the perceived distance between ourselves and our students.
References
DeSurra, C., & Church, K. A. (1994). Unlocking the classroom closet: Privileging the
marginalized voices of gay/lesbian college students. Paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the Speech Communication Association.
Lovett, M., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Ambrose, S. A., & Norman, M. K. (2023). How learning works: 8 research-based principles for smart teaching (2nd ed.) Wiley.
Pascarella, E., Whitt, E., Edison, M., & Nora, A. (1997). Women’s percep- tions of a “chilly climate” and their cognitive outcomes during the first year of college. Journal of College Student Development, 38(2), 109–124.
Whitt, E., Nora, A., Edison, M., Terenzini, P., & Pascarella, E. (1999). Women’s perceptions of a “chilly climate” and cognitive outcomes in college: Additional evidence. Journal of College Student Development, 40(2), 163–177.
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