Create a Positive School Climate and Culture
Home > K–12 Education > School Climate
Data-backed insights to create a positive learning environment where students thrive
A positive school climate is crucial for academic, emotional, and behavioral success. You can cultivate and maintain a positive school climate to ensure that your students and staff thrive.
Creating a positive climate is a unique process for each school. Hanover can help develop the approach that best suits your district. Our suite of research, tools, and expert guidance will give you the data you need to evaluate the current state of your school climate and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

Get the tools you need to foster positive learning communities for your students
Assess and monitor the current state of your school climate
Hanover’s Climate Survey provides a comprehensive view of culture and climate in your district. You can view the results for your specific district, and benchmark against other districts from across the country in our School Climate Dashboard.
Engage the community in climate improvements
Our focus group facilitators will lead discussions with staff, students, and parents on school climate. Our analysis will reveal in-depth insights you can use to develop a strong sense of belonging among key community members.
Evaluate SEL competencies
Hanover's SEL Survey will measure student’s SEL competencies and identify areas in which staff need additional support.
Select the best strategies to support a positive climate
Hanover will identify promising practices and programs in peer districts that can be adopted in your district as well as share input from national peers on well-being initiatives.
Give teachers the tools they need to cultivate a positive climate
Our online professional learning platform supports educators across twelve crucial education topic areas such as creating equitable and culturally responsive classroom strategies and environments, enhancing students’ social-emotional learning, and supporting evidence-based practices through a Multi-Tiered System of Supports.
Evaluating your equity and behavior management
Hanover's Discipline Analysis will identify notable gaps, trends, and areas of focus for changes in your discipline policy. You will be able to compare rates and disproportionalities in disciplinary infractions taken over time, across schools, and between student groups.

Why Ceres Unified School District is Partnering with Hanover Research
“Over the last year or so, we’ve shifted our mindset from looking at teacher professional development as a one-way process to an actual learning process. Then March happened, and we went into crisis mode to help our teachers through our online platforms. We were able to provide some digital learning resources for teachers over the last few months, but as we started to prep for summer, we started to think about what we normally provide for our teachers, and how we can incentivize them to participate in professional learning and provide feedback.”
– Dr. Amy Peterman, Assistant Superintendent Educational Services

New Albany-Plain Local School District Assesses Students’ Social-Emotional Competencies
“We have really appreciated our partnership with Hanover, particularly in being able to do longitudinal work—we like being able to look at work from years ago to see school improvement shown through data-driven insights. The survey team has given us solid research that we can lean on to make informed decisions driven by what our community is showing and saying; we plan to use these survey results to see how we can best support our students in their social-emotional learning. We’ve done substance use, SEL, and staff climate surveys with Hanover, and have found that our partnership helps us be better at what we do.”
– Jon Hood, Director of Student Services, Safety & Security

Lake Forest Academy Creates Educational Outcome Index to Track Student Performance
“We have a mission to cultivate and embody our four pillars. There are some areas where we have identifiable performance metrics, like a student’s GPA, how many AP classes they are taking, etc.—but there was a call to find tangible metrics to demonstrate growth over time for areas like Character and Citizenship. Hanover’s survey instrument provided a subsection of questions and topics for each pillar, so being able to break down from the macro view to look at detailed insights let us examine if we were doing anything differently that led to our success, or if our students have a greater awareness of the things around them.”
– Chris Tennyson, Assistant Head of School, Dean of Students & Academic Affairs, and Mathematics Teacher
Ways to Partner
Hanover offers multiple ways to work with us. From one-on-one expert guidance and custom research to professional learning and on-demand resources, our goal is to customize our capabilities and support to best meet your needs.
Our research partnership provides you with a dedicated research team and a customized research plan that will deliver actionable insights and analysis.
- Best Practices
- Survey Design & Analysis
- Benchmarking
- Data Analytics
- Qualitative Research
Our Advisory Services include our research services in addition to personalized support from one of our advisors, interactive workshops, and group consultations.
- Capacity Building
- Implementation Support
- Interactive Workshops
- Group Consultation
The Educator Learning Center (ELC) is our online professional learning platform that makes teacher learning sustainable, useful, and convenient.
- Interactive Learning Modules
- Resource Library
- Discussion Boards
- Custom-Built Content
- Implementation Advisor
Our always-on resource that provides research, data, benchmarking, and implementation tools that you can access anytime and share across teams and departments.
- Online Research Library
- Implementation Tools
- Benchmarking Analytics