Transforming School Climate by Harnessing Adolescent Demand for Autonomy

We evaluate an educational program that aims to improve the school climate in socioeconomically disadvantaged post-primary schools by leveraging adolescents’ natural demand for autonomy. The innovative nature of the intervention is that it aims to channel adolescents’ struggle for independence into the effort of transforming their schools’ climate. To do this, the intervention indirectly targets adolescents’ beliefs about their ability to control their own lives and influence their environment, i.e., their locus of control. This indirect targeting works by giving almost full autonomy to select adolescents (senior students), we refer to as “student teachers”, to convey the importance of these beliefs to their younger peers (junior students). This unique implementation style is expected to improve individual outcomes of both adolescents (student teachers and their close networks) and their younger peers. By internalizing what they teach, we expect the student teachers to take responsibility for transforming their surroundings, help mitigate bad behavior and establish good norms in their schools. We expect these changes to materialize through their improved internal locus of control. We also expect junior peers to be affected by these teachings directly and adopt good behavioral norms, and have improved internal locus of control.
We first selected student teachers based on their in-degree centrality in friendship networks, their popularity, and emotional intelligence scores. These select students were given a curriculum to cover one hour per week for 5 months in junior classes with mostly hands-off guidance from designated interns. The trial involves 65 middle schools in the Turkish province of Diyarbakir. Student teachers were chosen from grades 7 and 8 (senior years in middle school), and they teach 5th and 6th-grade students, respectively (junior years in middle school) in their own schools.