Positive School Climate for New Immigrant Students in Czech Elementary School: From School-Specific Definition to Whole-School Strategy
Abstract
Introduction: Recent guidelines issued by the Czech School Inspectorate encourage each Czech school to develop its own strategy for immigrant student education (CSI 2019, p. 37-38). The demographic trend derived from national statistical data points to the need of empirical research and best practices (Czech Ministry of Education, 2019).
This has moral implications for schools (Ciccone & Frieberg 2013, p. 42): In order to improve the services the Czech schools provide to immigrant children and families, it is imperative for them to focus on improvement efforts (Ciccone & Frieberg, 2013, p. 15). Therefore, the author has asked highly multiculturally-experienced and motivated school staff at a Czech elementary school to define positive school climate for immigrant students.
Methodology: The study uses semi-structured interviews with school staff to identify school-level and -specific themes that define positive school climate for new immigrant students as perceived by the school staff. The selection of interviewees was preceded by participant observations.
Based on 30 full-days of participant observations the author chose 4 interviewees who fulfilled the criteria (welcoming and engaged). The criteria were determined using the American National School Climate standards and put into the context relevant to immigrant students (Ciccone & Frieberg 2013, p. 37-38).
Interviewees fulfilled the criteria by being highly experienced in teaching immigrant students and their high motivation to participate in the research. They were given two questions: (1) What are your best teaching experiences? (2) Which are the best practices for working with new immigrant students in schools? We classified the data using the thematic networks technique into basic themes (n=111), organizing themes (n=8) and global themes (n=2) (Attride-Stirling 2001, p. 388-389).
When classifying data, themes that were more common were given precedence. The perspectives of school staff were evaluated by the headmaster in a follow-up interview.
Conclusions: The results show that when defining positive school climate for new immigrant students, the school staff emphasized individual approach and teachers professional development. Conclusively, the headmaster provided the following final definition: It is the schools long term vision with the primary goal to enhance learning of immigrant students: The school knows how to identify individual-specific conditions for learning of new immigrant students and knows how to establish this conditions at all school levels.
This paper argues that involving multiculturally experienced school staff to fundamentally define positive school climate for immigrant students, can help the headmaster to design a very school-specific strategy for immigrant students.