While school
culture is evident in all schools, it is nevertheless, elusive and difficult to
define (Hinde, 2002) The difficulty of the quest is the
reality that school culture is not static but rather shaped and reshaped through
interactions with stakeholders, worldview perspectives, and reflective
opportunities (Finnan, 2000). Changing
the prevailing school culture is both the most important and most difficult
aspect of educational leadership (Barth, 2002).
Effective
school leaders help shape the school's culture
of learning for all by communicating the norms and values for high expectations as well as providing the tools for assessing elements supporting the school's
purpose and mission. The school’s
culture needs to reinforce positive elements while transforming current negative
areas hindering the learning for all
mission. The Character Education Partnership
(CEP) believes character is an important attribute for a positive school
culture. The CEP posits two categories for
defining character:
1) Moral character, as exhibited through high levels
of kindness, honesty, and respect toward others.
2) Performance character, as demonstrated by “perseverance,
critical thinking, and commitment to quality” (CEP, 2012, p. 3).
Effective
school leaders seek to adjust their school’s culture to create sustained school
improvement by promoting the following three conditions:
1)
Measures of success and metrics for areas
of improvement beyond mere test scores,
2)
Comprehensive understanding of what entails
“school culture" (p. 5),
3)
Tools for developing and assessing the
school’s culture and delineation of accountability for diverse aspects of the school’s
culture (CEP,
2012).
The principal,
teachers, and parents are all school leaders needing to be available to shape a
school’s non-negotiable culture (Peterson
& Deal, 1998). Collaboration is
essential for developing systemic buy-in for promoting a school culture that drives
sustained school improvement (Marzano & Waters, 2009). Since “The public
school establishment is one of the most stubbornly intransigent forces on the
planet” (Marzano & Waters, 2009, p. 2), positive culture change needs new
thinking, willingness, humility, collaboration, and a collective vision
grounded in a clear mission. The
effective school leader and district leader must uniformly explicate a positive
change plan to rally other stakeholders to collaboratively develop consensus and
thereby effectively implement required change initiatives.
Stakeholders will need to put the past in perspective and
willingly embrace a new view of collaborative district and school leadership,
which is a critical component of effective schools (Marzano
& Waters, 2009). The change
begins with recognizing that although schools are loosely coupled by design,
they can be tightly coupled in relation to non-negotiable goals and a culture
for promoting student learning. Therefore,
the district office and its leaders need to guide the vision and consensus
toward a district-wide culture based on “defined autonomy” (p. 8). It is then essential to communicate this mission
and the clear vision to both internal and external stakeholders, otherwise,
change is slow or nonexistent.
The mutual
responsibility of a district leader and school principal within a highly
reliable district is to develop “a shared vision of what the school could be
like (Marzano & Waters, 2009, p. 100).
This is directly related to the responsibility of superintendent’s
leadership to “ensure collaborative goal setting” (Marzano & Waters, 2009,
p. 94). By working with the staff to
develop a culture perceived by stakeholders’ to advance the new mission of
learning for all within its school, the educational leaders develop a
collaborative vision of what could be possible for the school.
Therefore,
“during collaborative goal setting, the principal’s role is twofold relative to
this responsibility—to ensure that a meaningful, shared vision is constructed
at the school and to ensure that the school-level vision incorporates the
district-level vision as manifested by the nonnegotiable goals for achievement
and instruction” (Marzano & Waters, 2009, p. 95). Quoting results from Jenkins, Louis,
Walberg, and Keefe (1994, p. 72), Lezotte
and Snyder (2011) reinforce the most significant feature common to
world-class schools “was their continual effort toward becoming “learning organizations
with a commitment to continuous problem-solving and a sense of shared
responsibility for improvement” (p. 67).
A consistent exhibition of a clear vision leading toward the desired mission,
commitment by all to learning for all, and sharing the responsibility for
success of the mission, certainly appears to be the minimal culture of an
effective school.
To cite:
References:
Anderson,
C.J. (November 3, 2012) The correlation between positive school culture and the
Learning for All mission [Web
log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/
References:
Barth, R.
S. (2002) The culture builder. Educational
Leadership 59 (8) 6-11
CEP (2012)
Developing
and assessing school culture: A new level of accountability for schools
Retrieved from:
Finnan, C. (April 2000) Implementing
school reform models: Why is it so hard for some schools
and
easy for others? Paper
presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New
Orleans. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED446356).
Hinde,
E.R.
(2012) School culture and change: An examination of the effects of school culture
on
the process of change. Retrieved
from: http://usca.edu/essays/vol122004/hinde.pdf
Lezotte,
L. W., & Snyder, K. M. (2011). What effective schools do:
Re-envisioning the
correlates.
Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.
Marzano,
R. & Waters, T. (2009). District leadership that works. Bloomington,
IN: Solution
Tree Press
Narvaez,
D. (2010) Building a sustaining classroom climate for purposeful ethical
citizenship, in
Lovat, T & Toomey,
R. (Eds.), International Research Handbook of Values Education and Student
Well being. New York: Springer.
Peterson, K. and Deal T. (1998).
How leaders influence the culture of schools. Educational
Leadership 56 (1), 28-30.
