How Does School Climate Affect Teacher Efficacy? (an Oldie But Goodie)

From the Marshall Memo #445

In this intriguing 1993 Elementary School Journal article, Wayne Hoy and Anita Woolfolk of Rutgers University report on how the organizational health of a school affects teachers’ sense of efficacy. Research has linked teachers’ belief in their ability to have a positive effect on student learning to their skill at classroom management, willingness to adopt innovations, administrators’ ratings, and student achievement. 

What is school climate? Hoy and Woolfolk say, “A healthy school is one in which harmony pervades relationships among students, teachers, and administrators as the organization directs its energies toward its mission. Healthy schools appear to be high-achieving schools.” And how did they measure teachers’ sense of efficacy? By asking them to rate their agreement or disagreement with these two statements: 

• When it comes right down to it, a teacher really can’t do much because most of a student’s motivation and performance depends on his or her home environment. This measures general teaching efficacy – outcome expectations for schools and districts.
• If I try really hard, I can get through to even the most difficult of unmotivated students. This measures personal teaching efficacy – expectations of the impact of one’s own classroom work.

Interestingly, research has found that teachers’ responses to these two statements are independent of each other. In other words, a teacher might be optimistic about the ability of schools to overcome home environment, but not feel that he or she could have much impact on difficult students because of a lack of skills or unfavorable conditions in a particular school. Conversely, a teacher could agree that home environment is very difficult to overcome but think he or she is the exception to the rule and will be able to turn around difficult students.

Hoy and Woolfolk say healthy schools work well at the technical, managerial, and institutional levels. Their study of 179 New Jersey elementary teachers was designed to find which of these six variables are most helpful to teacher efficacy:

• Institutional integrity – Teachers are protected from unreasonable community and parental demands and the school maintains its educational integrity.

• Principal influence – The school leader is able to persuade superiors, get additional consideration for the school, and operate with reasonable autonomy within the school.

• Consideration – The principal is friendly, supportive, open, and collegial, showing genuine concern for the welfare of teachers.

• Resource support – There are adequate classroom supplies and instructional materials and extra resources are provided when teachers request them.

• Morale – Hoy and Woolfolk define this as “a collective sense of friendliness, openness, enthusiasm, and trust among faculty members. Teachers like each other, like their jobs, and help each other; and they are proud of their school and feel a sense of accomplishment in their jobs.” 

• Academic emphasis – The school is driven by a quest for academic excellence. “High but achievable academic goals are set for students,” say the authors; “the learning environment is orderly and serious; teachers believe in their students’ ability to achieve; and students work hard and respect those who do well academically.” 

Here’s what Hoy and Woolfolk found: only two of these predicted personal teaching efficacy: principal influence and academic emphasis. “Schools promoted personal teaching efficacy when teachers perceived that their colleagues (a) set high but achievable goals, 

(b) create an orderly and serious environment, and (c) respect academic excellence,” say the authors. “Further, principals who were perceived as having influence with their superiors were also likely to effect a situation where teachers felt more personally efficacious.”

Hoy and Woolfolk were surprised to find that school morale was not a significant driver of personal teaching efficacy – feelings of trust, confidence, friendship, cohesiveness, and warmth. “Clearly, morale, job satisfaction, and the emotional support of co-workers are important to the psychological well-being of teachers,” they say, “but apparently, these expressive qualities are not enough to give teachers the confidence that they can effectively teach their most difficult students.”

Hoy and Woolfolk were also surprised that niceness on the part of the principal was also not related to personal teaching efficacy: “It may be that only task-oriented behaviors of principals are seen as producing an environment conducive to motivating ‘difficult’ students,” theorize the authors; “principals who ‘go to bat’ for their teachers with superiors are seen as more helpful than principals who are merely kind and supportive… Environments that are warm and supportive interpersonally may make teachers more satisfied with their jobs or less stressed, but they appear to have little effect on a teacher’s confidence about reaching difficult students.”

What about general teaching efficacy – that is, the belief that the school can overcome students’ home environment? It is driven by institutional integrity and morale, the study found. This is a matter of buffering teachers from negative parent and community influences and maximizing positive parent involvement – volunteers in the school, good turnout at parent meetings, and parents helping students with their homework. 

The most intriguing finding of Hoy and Woolfolk’s study was the independence of personal and general teaching efficacy. Moreover, they say, “factors that nurture personal efficacy seem likely to have limited effects on general teaching efficacy and vice versa.” Why would this be? They suggest two possibilities:

• Schools with high parental involvement may lead teachers to focus their attention on supportive parents and “write off” difficult students whose parents are less involved. 
• As teachers have more classroom experience, they increase their sense of personal efficacy, believing they have the skills to get through to difficult students, but develop a general sense of powerlessness in overcoming negative home-environment factors. 

Hoy and Woolfolk conclude by suggesting that schools conduct regular organizational health inventories: “We recommend that school administrators use the health inventory as a continuing assessment of their own administrative practice and the influence of their practice on teacher efficacy.” They suggest focusing especially on the factors that seem to make the biggest difference to personal and general teaching efficacy:

• Institutional integrity
• Principal influence
• Academic emphasis

“Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy and the Organizational Health of Schools” by Wayne Hoy and Anita Woolfolk in The Elementary School Journal, March 1993 (Vol. 93, #4, p. 355-372), no e-link available