What is School Culture?
The pandemic has uncovered the true strength (or weakness) of school cultures across the world.
Many educators were able to rely on their colleagues to make the best of a difficult situation. They collaborated with their team to design instruction, make changes to curriculum, research and implement effective technology, and support the Social-Emotional Learning of their students.
Others didn’t have a support system in place and fought through the pandemic individually.
How can there be such a difference?
School culture.
So what is school culture?
School culture includes the values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors within the organization.
Values - The guiding principles that influence what an organization believes and prioritizes as most important
Beliefs - What an organization believes to be true
Norms - The expected behaviors from people within the organization
Behaviors - The way people within an organization actually act
What happens when you have a good school culture?
Increased teacher retention rates from staff
More collaboration among staff
Improved teacher and staff well-being
Increased student achievement (culture affects climate)
In fact, according to the Harvard School of Education article What Makes a Good School Culture,
“researchers who have studied culture have tracked and demonstrated a strong and significant correlation between organizational culture and an organization’s performance.”
Values: Just like performance indicators for teacher evaluations, values can have indicators as well. It is important to break down organizational values into behavioral indicators for a few reasons:
This exercise brings clarity to the leadership team designing the values.
These indicators bring clarity to the rest of the staff so they know what each value looks, sounds, and feels like in action.
Specific feedback and be provided based on these behavioral indicators.
Organic or Intentional School Culture?
School culture is either organic (it happens naturally), or it is intentional (it is created because of a specific set of values, beliefs, norms, and repeated behaviors). Best-in-class organizations don’t let culture just happen. Organic cultures tend to be broad, not well defined, and don’t provide specific models or exemplars of appropriate beliefs or behaviors.
Rather, best-in-class organizations intentionally create values, beliefs, norms, and experiences that pull people together, build relationships, and support one another. In fact, a strong, intentional school culture is a key component in effective teacher retention strategies.
Hidden School Culture
Values, beliefs, and norms can be written on paper and communicated to staff in your school. However, there can also be a hidden culture, meaning the assumptions and behaviors of people outside of the written values and beliefs. This hidden culture typically presents itself with the school leader is not around.
A few questions to ask yourself to identify if you have a hidden culture are below:
What are your teachers saying in the staff lunchroom or after school? Does this match what the school culture you’re trying to build?
Do the behaviors of your teachers staff align with your expectations?
Does each of your students believe they have a champion at school that will do whatever it takes for them to succeed?
If you answered negatively about any of the questions above, you have some work to do to create a school culture that permeates your organization.
What kind of school culture do I have?
There are several steps school administrators can take right now to better understand your school culture
Recognize that school leaders shape school culture. While this can be a difficult and painful process, reflect on your own values, beliefs, and behaviors. Everything a leader does (and doesn’t do) impacts the school culture. What are you saying? How are you saying it? When do your own behaviors reinforce your aspirational culture? When do they not?
Audit your school culture. You don’t need a form or a specific process for this. Rather, listen to teacher and staff conversations, look at the walls in hallways and classrooms, speak with parents, talk with students. What are the general attitudes and beliefs you notice? Is it one of positivity, or is negativity most prevalent? Do they match your aspirational school culture?
Take note of areas for celebration and where additional growth is needed. Not everything you notice will be great; not everything will be bad either.
Celebrate the good you saw. We all need exemplars from time to time. Be specific about what exactly you noticed that matched your aspirational culture.
Connect everything back to your values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors. Continually reinforce your aspirational culture. Over-communicate what you expect and why it’s important.
Continually reinforce your aspirational culture through your attitude, words, and behaviors. Whether in newsletters, announcements, staff meetings, social media, or some other medium, you must continually model the attitudes and behaviors you expect from your staff. This is critically important in difficult situations (such as a pandemic). Your staff will follow your lead. Choose your attitude, words, and behaviors appropriately.
Remove colleagues who are actively undermining the culture. If you have staff members who are creating a toxic culture, sometimes the best course of action is to remove them from your school. No amount of coaching or modeling can change some people’s attitudes, words, and behaviors. If you have somebody like this on your staff, be sure to follow your organization’s HR policies. Removing just one toxic person can have a huge impact on the overall culture of your organization.
School culture can be nebulous and hard to identify. However, as a school leader, it’s critically important that you take the steps to both understand your current school culture and create your culture intentionally. Teacher well-being, retention, and even student achievement are all impacted by school culture.