Using School Climate to Determine a School's Readiness for Quality Program Implementation and Adoption

This study examines the role of teaching climate on the implementation of a school-based prevention program across 2 different teacher support conditions designed to promote implementation fidelity of HealthWise (HW), an intervention to reduce substance use and sexual risk among high school students in Cape Town, SA. The 2 support conditions were: enhanced school environment (ESE) and support and supervision (SS). The 3^rd support condition, enhanced training (ET), was not well attended and thus ET attendance was used as a covariate in the analyses.

Three domains of teaching climate were measured with a survey prior to the start of the intervention in grade 8. These constructs were used for their associations with curriculum implementation success in other studies. Seventy-seven teachers (41 SS & 39 ESE) returned their completed surveys at the beginning of the interventions and were thus included in this study. Three pairs of items were averaged to create summary variables about the degree to which teachers felt: 1) satisfied and had good morale with respect to their job (satisfied), 2) consulted and encouraged to bring in their own ideas (valued), and 3) perceived a supportive and positive atmosphere for teaching HW (supported). Implementation quality of HW lessons was rated at the end of 8^th grade by HW staff.

Three hierarchical regressions were used to assess whether teaching climate (satisfied, valued, and supported) moderated the effect of SS or ESE supports on implementation quality. Results indicated that at the last step there was a significant change in the feeling valued model prediction (ΔR² = .07, p < .05) and job satisfaction model (ΔR² =.05, p < .05). That is, while there were no significant main effects or 2-way interactions found, there was a significant 3-way interaction of SS, ESE and feeling valued predicting quality implementation (β = .31, p < .05) and of SS, ESE and job satisfaction predicting implementation (β = .25, p < .05) above and beyond the variance explained by the other variables entered in the model. A comparison of slopes (Dawson, 2013) indicates that when receiving both SS and ESE, feeling less valued was associated with poorer implementation quality of HW. Additionally, implementation quality of HW was better among those with low job satisfaction when they received only ESE. On the other hand, teachers with high job satisfaction had lower levels of HW implementation quality when they received ESE alone relative to receiving SS+ESE or neither condition.

Findings suggest it is important to evaluate how teachers perceive the teaching climate before employing efforts to increase implementation quality of interventions.  Different types of teacher support seem to work better depending on perceptions of teaching climate.