The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook

Kent D. Peterson, Terrence E. Deal

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780787996802
• eBook ISBN: 9781118047590
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

When the bestselling books Shaping School Culture and The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook were first published, Kent D. Peterson and Terrence E. Deal described the critical elements of school culture—the purposes, traditions, norms, and values that guide and glue the community together. The authors showed how a positive culture makes school reform work and the companion Fieldbook included the tools needed to bring out the best in students, teachers, and the surrounding community

In today's complex educational environment, new challenges have surfaced for school leaders who must grapple with issues of standards-based testing, school accountability, and student achievement. The second edition of The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook offers a companion to the newly revised edition of Shaping School Culture and includes an expanded version of Peterson and Deal's time-tested model to address the latest thinking on school culture and change. The Fieldbook offers a wealth of new ideas and approaches and includes new material on "toxic" environments with specific action plans. In addition, the book contains powerful new case examples for revitalizing school culture.

The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook draws on the authors' extensive research and nationwide school contacts and includes hands-on strategies and exercises for helping school leaders:

• Uncover a school's hidden values, beliefs, and assumptions

• Think through and develop a school's mission and purpose
  
  

• Work out appropriate stories, metaphors, and symbols to represent a school
  
  

• Devise rituals and ceremonies for enriching the school experience
  
  

• Rethink leadership practices in light of educational and cultural needs
  
  

• Identify, transform, and heal a "toxic" educational culture
  
  

This important resource will help school leaders understand, assess, and transform school culture for organizational success.

chapter ONE

Introduction and Organization of the Fieldbook

This guide is designed to help you reflect on and hone leadership skills as you shape a better learning environment at your school where every child can learn. It may legitimate some of what you already know and are doing or add new possibilities. It also provides activities to develop cultural leadership, and it deepens and concretizes the concept of school culture by connecting it to the success of schools and students.

 

When gathering cases for our second edition of Shaping School Culture, we sought the best examples of a wide variety of cultural patterns and ways. These examples of what is possible piqued the curiosity of others. Over the past few years, interested leaders have asked us to help them learn how to read, appraise, and shape the culture of their school or district. Facing greater accountability, new curricular standards, and an expanded use of data in decision making, school leaders have often tightened structures. But the best leaders never forgot the central importance of their school’s culture. Drawing on approaches we have used with thousands of principals, as well as new ideas from the leadership literature, we have distilled concrete ways to approach cultural analysis, review, and reinforcement. In this new edition, we have added more case examples, deepened the descriptions of the elements of culture, and expanded the set of strategies leaders can use to nurture positive and transform toxic cultures. We have redesigned many of the activities and added new ones to enhance the repertoire of leaders. We have written a completely new chapter on the important topic of people and relationships, the informal network in schools. This chapter describes the positive and negative roles staff take on and how to work with them. This new chapter offers strategies for making the informal network a productive element of the school’s culture.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This guide combines both active and reflective approaches for those who wish to invigorate their school’s professional community, build trust and commitment, and return the heart and spirit to our schools. Underlying the chapters are three key processes for shaping cultural ways and traditions.

Leaders must

• Read cultural clues

• Review existing patterns and ways

• Reinforce or transform the culture

Initially, it is critical that leaders read existing cultural practices and ways to understand the key features of the culture. They need to revisit roots—the history of their district or school—and reconsider core features of the present. During this process, the leader is interpreting and intuitively identifying familiar ways that are positive as well as traditional baggage that is negative, depressing, or draining.

Second, leaders need to hold up existing customs against other possibilities. They need to identify positive, supportive norms, values, rituals, and traditions to understand the meaning of stories and to know the import of symbols. But they should also pinpoint cultural aspects that may be negative, harmful, or toxic. What positive things need more reinforcement? What time-honored but worn-out practices may need to be jettisoned?

Finally, leaders must work in a variety of ways to reinforce cultural patterns or else transform them. Even the best ways of life and meaningful rituals of a district or school need constant attention. In addition, moribund or negative features may need to be transformed, changed, or even shed. Both nurturance and change are part of cultural leadership.

THE FIELDBOOK’S ORGANIZERS: DISCUSSIONS, EXAMPLES, ACTIVITIES, AND CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

This book provides a wide variety of sources of information, inspiration, and suggestions. It can be read and used in a multitude of ways, either as a whole or in part. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the features of culture and the roles of symbolic leaders. These discussions are often followed by a set of illustrative examples.

Next, the book provides specific activities for individuals or teams that we call “Activities.” Some are specifically designed as group activities, with suggestions for how to organize the session. Others are meant to stimulate reflection; in that case, the questions can become topics for dialogue or group brainstorming. These approaches have been tested and used with hundreds of educators.

Interspersed throughout the book are additional questions that we have titled “Crucial Questions,” which provide the reader with ideas of interest to consider or to discuss with staff. These questions are useful for leaders to consider, but can also become the guiding topics for a staff discussion. Sometimes there are further suggestions for activities, reflections, and planning.

PART ONE

Interpreting School Culture

chapter TWO

The Importance of Culture

A great deal of attention has been paid to making schools better. Policymakers want to get schools to change quickly and be more responsive to state mandates. The favored response has been to tighten up structures, standardize the curriculum, test student performance, and make schools accountable. In the short term, these solutions may pressure schools to change some practices and temporarily raise test scores. In the long term, such structural demands can never rival the power of cultural expectations, motivations, and values.

At a deeper level, all organizations, including schools, improve performance by fostering a shared system of norms, folkways, values, and traditions. These infuse an enterprise with passion, purpose, and a sense of spirit. Without a strong, positive culture, schools flounder and die. The culture of a school or district plays a central role in exemplary performance.

It is the same in any other setting. Whether it is a Starbucks coffee bar, a Southwest flight, or a Nordstrom department store, people function best when they passionately hold to a shared set of key values, central norms, and meaningful traditions.

The key to successful school performance is heart and spirit infused into relationships among people, their efforts to serve all students, and a shared sense of responsibility for learning. Without heart and spirit nourished by cultural ways, schools become learning factories devoid of soul and passion, dead cultures without spirit.

Strong, positive school cultures do not just happen. They are built over time by those who work in and attend the school and by the formal and informal leaders who encourage and reinforce values and traditions. Many schools limp along with a weak or unfocused culture due to a paucity of leadership and a lack of concern. But there are just as many other schools that are flourishing because of a strong, passionate culture. These are supported and nourished by teacher leaders and school principals who consciously or unconsciously reinforce the best that the school and its staff can become. Schools with unfocused cultures are barely surviving, whereas schools with strong, positive cultures are rich in purpose and abundant in tradition and meaning.

The central concern of this book is the development of meaningful and productive schools. Leaders must shape and nourish a culture in which every teacher can make a difference and every child can learn and in which there are passion for and commitment to designing and promoting the absolute best that is possible.

WHAT IS SCHOOL CULTURE?

The notion of school culture is far from new. In 1932, educational sociologist Willard Waller (1932) argued that every school has a culture of its own, with a set of rituals and folkways and a moral code that shapes behavior and relationships. Parents and students have always detected the special, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• THE AUTHORS
• chapter ONE - Introduction and Organization of the Fieldbook
• PART ONE - Interpreting School Culture
• PART TWO - Transforming School Culture
• REFERENCES
• INDEX