Capitalizing on Classroom Climate to Promote Positive Development

Although many conceptualizations of classroom climate exist, one view is that it involves individual and group level interactions in a classroom with teachers and students, as well as interactions among students. Classroom climate is important to academic and social aspects of student learning and development. The research literature on classroom climate has largely been advanced by educational and public health theory and research. This chapter presents a novel pairing of ideas and evidence about classroom climate and the field of Positive Development (PD). From a PD perspective, the classroom is a setting, which has the potential to confer an array of resources to youth. To this end, we present Goals, Attitudes, and Values in School (GAVIS) as an illustration of a research program in Sweden that demonstrates how PD theory and the study of classroom climate can intersect. Future empirical work of classroom climate taking into consideration the intersections with PD theory and research will open up new avenues for intervention and improvement of classroom climate, as well as more effective and frequent multidisciplinary collaboration within classrooms as a key ecology of youth development.