Social-Emotional Classroom Climate: Exploring the Roles of Teachers, Students, and SEL Implementation Supports

Teachers and students constantly interact with each other throughout the day (Hamre et al., 2013), while also experiencing a range of emotions, such as anxiety, stress, happiness, pride, and rejection (Valiente et al., 2020). Therefore, teachers’ and students’ coping skills and interpersonal abilities permeate the classroom environment. Although there is an increased interest in school-based social-emotional factors, including teacher well-being (Grant et al., 2019) and student social-emotional learning (SEL; Haymovitz et al., 2018), there remains a limited understanding of the mechanisms through which teachers foster healthy social-emotional classroom climates conducive to learning. Healthy classroom climate consists of daily supportive, responsive, engaging, and effective teacher-student interactions (Moen et al., 2019). In turn, these high-quality interactions are associated with important social-emotional and academic student outcomes (Cash et al., 2019; LoCasale-Crouch et al., 2018; Mashburn et al., 2008). In this three-manuscript style dissertation, I seek to understand the teacher and student factors, as well as the SEL implementation supports, that may contribute to healthy classroom climate and student outcomes.