Reframing the assessment of safe, caring and welcoming schools

Abstract

A theoretical construct of students’ perceptions of safe and caring schools was developed to allow administrators and teachers to have a comprehensive understanding of how their students perceive care. The construct of care is highly subjective but with the use of the multi-modal assessment tool developed, students will be able to communicate their needs for care and staff members will be able to analyze how they care for their students. The assessment tool, consisting of a quantitative survey, monthly student response journals, staff self-assessments, safe and caring project showcase and longitudinal narrative inquiry, would allow emerging data to be triangulated resulting in a robust analysis that could be used to drive school programming and inform policy development at the senior administration level. The assessment plan was designed to delineate students’ perceptions of care to provide a recursive feedback loop for schools to respond to changing demographics and staffing.