The Good, Better, Best of School Culture

It seems the universe wants me to think more deeply about school culture this week. So, I'm asking myself:
How can we achieve the best school culture?

 I attended Edcamp Leadership Massachusetts on Monday (see #edcampldrma for the live tweets from the day) and the dominating theme was school culture to promote positive change and to address the current climate of unrest and inequity nationally and globally. The participants there asked themselves and one another what responsibilities schools have to intentionally shape their culture so that our students have a healthy environment to ask tough questions.

Then, of course, I read a few chapters in Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work as part of my summer learning with a few colleagues at school and the focus was on school culture. As I read, I found myself returning to the Cultural Shifts table in Chapter 3.

This and other reproducibles from PLC books can be found here.
Overall, the trend I noticed throughout the table is the quest to give all stakeholders a seat at the table. This means that administrators are working closely with faculty; teachers are constantly sharing, celebrating, and critiquing their work together; and students receive and are able to respond to formative feedback frequently. A school culture that promotes this kind of transparency will always be improving because every student, teacher, and leader has plenty of colleagues who willingly share their work for the betterment of the community.

It got me thinking about what this looks like at the classroom level and as part of that relationship between students and teacher. The work of Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey on personalized learning immediately came to mind. They also provide a chart, updated in their recent book Making Learning Personal, to help educators understand how to make the shift to a classroom culture that respects the personal learning needs of their students and promotes a healthier classroom community.




When a classroom community strives for personalization, the each learner is a stakeholder who has a clear voice in his/her own learning. While the table in the first book emphasizes the formation of a culture among the adults in the school, the table in the second book emphasizes the formation of a culture in the classroom. Why not tell our students we are working on building this kind of community and include them in it using the personalized learning table? Any time we can be transparent with both our colleagues and our students we are strengthening our school as a whole.

School culture is good when school leaders keep talking about it. School culture is better when school leaders and faculty come together. In the end, we will achieve the best of school culture when we involve our students in building that culture.

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