Using Children’s Drawings to Examine Student Perspectives of Classroom Climate in a School-within-a-School Elementary School

This study examines student perceptions of classroom climate at a school-within-a-school (SWAS) elementary school located in the southeastern United States. The elementary school contains a school for students identified as highly gifted within a neighborhood school. Researchers utilized drawings to determine students’ perceptions of their classrooms using an intentionally open-ended prompt that allowed students to focus on the aspects of their classroom they found most compelling. Classrooms with a climate that fostered community proved to be important to students, and they made connections between community and active engagement in academic tasks. Students in the 2 SWAS programs perceived the nature of a community-focused classroom climate differently; in the gifted program, collaboration and group work were privileged, whereas those in the neighborhood program expressed like-mindedness and/or a notion of group connectedness.