How to Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom

Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Ian Pumpian

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781416614081
• eBook ISBN: 9781416614579
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What does it feel like to walk into your school? Is it a welcoming place, where everyone feels valued? Most school improvement efforts focus on academic goals, instructional models, curriculum, and assessments. But sometimes what can make or break your learning community are the intangibles--the relationships, identity, and connections that make up its culture. Authors Fisher, Frey, and Pumpian believe that no school improvement effort will be effective unless school culture is addressed. They identify five pillars that are critical to building a culture of achievement:

1. Welcome: Imagine if all staff members in your school considered it their job to make every student, parent, and visitor feel noticed, welcomed, and valued.
2. Do no harm: Your school rules should be tools for teaching students to become the moral and ethical citizens you expect them to be.
3. Choice words: When the language students hear helps them tell a story about themselves that is one of possibility and potential, students perform in ways that are consistent with that belief.
4. It's never too late to learn: Can you push students to go beyond the minimum needed to get by, to discover what they are capable of achieving?
5. Best school in the universe: Is your school the best place to teach and learn? The best place to work?

Drawing on their years of experience in the classroom, the authors explain how these pillars support good teaching and learning. In addition, they provide 19 action research tools that will help you create a culture of achievement, so that your school or classroom is the best it can be. After reading this book, you'll see why culture makes the difference between a school that enables success for all students and a school that merely houses those students during the school day.

Chapter 1
Creating Culture in Schools

An underground flow of feelings and folkways [wending] its way within schools in the form of vision and values, beliefs and assumptions, rituals and ceremonies, history and stories, and physical symbols. (Deal & Peterson, 1999, pp. 7–8)

This book proposes that effective organizations, including schools, should make building culture part of a planned strategic effort. Most school improvement plans concentrate on academic achievement goals, decisions about academic focus, deployment of instructional models, and teaching techniques and curriculum tools. Most school improvement plans therefore aspire to create academic focus, an academic sense of responsibility, intensity, and urgency—that is, an "academic press" (Lee & Smith, 1999). Academic press is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to operationalize the mission of the school. We believe that no school improvement effort will be effective, maintained, or enhanced unless school culture and academic press are both addressed and aligned. Both developing school culture and creating academic press are necessary, but neither is in and of itself sufficient.

We suggest that these two elements of school effectiveness must be integrated and unified. Heretofore, researchers have referred to two curricula operating in the school. The first is the academic curriculum, which has been described as the objective, explicit curriculum of the school. The second is school culture—the implicit curriculum of the school. In this book, we propose that a school's culture should not be underground and assumed. It should be uncovered, openly and purposely discussed, assessed, and developed. School culture cannot be hidden and implicit; rather, it must be as explicit as our approach to teaching and learning. In fact, we propose that our academic press and our school culture should be looked at, thought about, and acted upon in a unified and coordinated manner.

Cultures are not created overnight or by pen and planning alone. Jerald (2006) argues that culture is born from an organization's vision, beliefs, values, and mission. Stating your mission is significant, but only a small part of your effort. Culture develops and grows up through an accumulation of actions, traditions, symbols, ceremonies, and rituals that are closely aligned with that vision.

According to Deal and Peterson (2009), research suggests that a strong, positive culture serves several beneficial functions, including the following:

• Fostering effort and productivity.
• Improving collegial and collaborative activities that in turn promote better communication and problem solving.
• Supporting successful change and improvement efforts.
• Building commitment and helping students and teachers identify with the school.
• Amplifying energy and motivation of staff members and students.
• Focusing attention and daily behavior on what is important and valued.

So we have purposely worked at developing school culture in ways that will further engage each student in a world-class educational experience. The looking, thinking, and acting we will encourage will be about increasing a culture of educational engagement by promoting

1. A culture that is welcoming,
2. A culture in which the conditions for learning are ever-present,
3. A culture in which we examine how our behaviors affect us, others, and our world,
4. A culture in which there is a shared belief that we are a part of something special and great, and
5. A culture in which the language creates and facilitates personal pride, purpose and power.

Cultures: Yes, Schools and Students Have Them

We believe that culture must be purposely developed and managed to optimize the chance to live our mission, become our vision, and fulfill our educational purpose and responsibilities. We also recognize that our students bring their cultures with them. Consider the following students, all enrolling in a local high school.

Amal is a 14-year-old girl. For the past six years she has attended an Islamic private school. Prior to that she was homeschooled. To this point in her life she has had virtually no unsupervised interactions with males outside her immediate family. She has a strong fundamental cultural identity as a Muslim girl.

Renee is also 14 years old. She has been homeschooled all her life. Her family organized the homeschooling of their children with other members of their church. Renee has a strong sense of culture from the values instilled in her by her family and her Christian faith.

Eddie chose this school to provide some separation between his schooling and his friends who are involved in gangs and attend what would have been Eddie's school. Despite his school choice, gang involvement is a large part of his family, his extended family, his current friends, and his community. That culture is a part of who Eddie presently is. Life on the streets dictates certain rules of survival, such as "fight back and defend family" and "retaliate when you or your family is disrespected."

Stephen chose to enroll in the school because of its unique health science career focus with industry-based internships. Stephen has always expected to attend college and graduate school and become a doctor. He gave up the opportunity to attend a high-performing suburban high school to attend one that catered to his niche interests. Stephen comes to school with a lot of cultural capital that has always made him a driven and successful student.

Tony attends the school because of the influence that a community mentor has had on his life for many years. Tony lives with his mother, his four siblings, and extended family members who have come and gone over the years. His mother's health limits her activity outside the home, and the family depends on public assistance. Tony has never been particularly interested or successful in school. His propensity to sleep in and ignore his alarm is frequent, as is his absenteeism. Tony expresses no postschool plans, and his commitment to graduate is weak. Tony's behavior is shaped by the challenges of living in a sphere of generational poverty.

These real vignettes are wrought with biting and predictable stereotypes. We assure you that each of these young people is a unique individual packed with obvious and hidden attributes, interests, talents, and gifts. Each has aspirations and nightmares that are influenced by every opportunity given to them and by every opportunity they were denied. The fact remains, however, that each of these unique individuals will come to school with a cultural identity that is based on his or her experiences. That culture has provided much of the context for how these individuals view the world.

So this book is also about the culture of schools populated by individuals. Although others may suggest that conscious attention to creating school culture may be mostly to promote student achievement, especially when the school population is diverse and includes many who may not have had experiences developing the cultural capital leading to successful public school performance, the five new students we profiled taught us otherwise. As a public school, we should at least expect that the school culture will be more pluralistic than many of these students have experienced. It may be less tolerant of behaviors they know that help them survive on the streets. It will certainly be committed to graduation and postsecondary planning. The public school will be more tolerant of differing views about sex, religion, politics, and discipline than some students have been raised to believe, while others may see the school's view as narrow and restricting. The fact is that students enter the culture of the school with an intact cultural identity that has been formed from already being part of one or more home and community cultures. The job of school, then, is to foster a bicultural student body—one that recognizes the home culture while creating a school one.

A diverse student body also means that students who have many different cultural histories are about to converge on a setting that hosts them all. On that point, know now that we believe that teaching tolerance, understanding, and respect is a nonnegotiable part of creating an effective school culture. We believe that creating an effective school culture for a student who arrives with a dissimilar cultural identity and history is likely to make a student bicultural. An effective school culture will provide students a respectful mediating experience through which they can understand, examine, affirm, modify, or change understandings of the world and how they want to engage in it. The bicultural experience will be pluralistic to the extent that each student will feel respected, welcomed, and included within that which defines the school. What is the alternative to a bicultural experience? If left to chance, if students feel prejudged and unwanted, they will create cultural cliques and take separate and parallel journeys through the school. They will not belong, feel ownership, and engage in the school or its mission. Their perspective of the school culture will be that there is no place for them, and that the school is not a place they want to be part of or a place where they choose to engage.

The other extreme to bicultural identity may be a wholesale rejection of all they believe and all the values and beliefs they have come to school with. If this means a rejection of behaviors and rituals that are illegal, undeniably destructive and antisocial, all the better. But public schools cannot be in the business of purposefully changing Republicans into Democrats or making pro-choice activists out of right-to-life believers (or vice versa). Public schools should be about creating understanding and tolerance regardless of students' personal moral and religious beliefs; and if information, reflection, and maturity solidifies their choices, causes them to doubt their choices, or changes their choices, so be it. The fact is Amal, Renee, Eddie, Stephen, and Tony have cultural identities and histories. School should provide them the safe opportunity to share their narrative, to tell their story, and to start writing the next several chapters of the person whom they aspire to be.

The Culture Must Facilitate Quality

As we have noted, having a mission is an important first step in improving student achievement, because it focuses the various people inside the organization on a common purpose. We are reminded of a school that had four different major educational reform efforts as their focus. Different teachers concentrated on different reforms. The reform efforts were not bad ideas–in fact some of them were really good. But the fact that different people were focused on different things made it hard for them to reach agreements and then focus on quality implementation of the ideas. When there is agreement on the focus, work gets directed toward that focus. We know of an elementary school, for example, that focused on writing instruction. Their mission included attention to students' communication skills, and the members of this school community agreed that writing was a need. As they honed their skills, they increased their understanding of quality instruction and were able to have some excellent conversations with one another about what worked and what did not.

Lasting change requires an agreement on quality such that the leader and the teacher can have a productive conversation. We'll come back to this point later, but our experiences with school improvement efforts suggest that reaching agreements on quality are crucial if professional development efforts and administrative or peer feedback are going to be effective.

As an example, think back to a conversation you've had with a teacher following a classroom observation. Say, for example, that you just returned from a conference that validated and extended your understanding of the importance of building on students' background knowledge. As part of the observation, you notice several opportunities that the teacher missed to build and activate background knowledge. The conversation you have with the teacher might go something like this:

Leader: How do you think the lesson went?

Teacher: Great, I thought that my students were all engaged.

Leader: Yes, true, they all seemed interested in the topic. Did you think about what they might already know about the topic? Or what they might not know about the topic?

Teacher: No, not really. I think that they learned a lot from the experience. Did you hear them talking with each other?

Leader: Yes, they were talking and asking good questions. But what did they already know?

Teacher: I'm not sure. But I will bet that they do well on the assessment.

Leader: Did you think about making connections between their background knowledge and the topic at hand? Could it be that some of the students already knew this before the lesson?

Teacher: Sure, but that's what happens in every lesson. Some know it already, some get it, and others need more teaching.

Leader: I think it would be useful to tap into students' background knowledge and then build on that with students.

Teacher: Yeah, maybe. I really liked the summaries they wrote at the end. You didn't get to see that part, but I can show you what they wrote. See …

This conversation isn't really getting anywhere, because the two people have a different understanding of quality, at least in terms of the topic of background knowledge. As a result, the teacher is immune to the feedback being provided and is not likely to change as a result of the experience.

As Goetsch and Davis (2010) note, people often define quality using specifications, standards, and other measures. It is useful for organizations to pay attention to the ways that their customers define quality. In different segments of the economy, people deal with quality differently. No matter what sector of the economy people are in, quality always affects their daily routines and lives. People are concerned with quality when grocery shopping, eating in a restaurant, and when making a purchasing decision. The definition of quality is the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind.

Having a shared definition of quality is important because it becomes part of the culture. A shared definition of quality also enlists all members of the culture, not just a few, to take an active part in the effort. Importantly, it also empowers people by sending them the message that they are of value and their contributions are essential. As educational leadership researcher and expert Michael Fullan notes: "Deep and sustained reform depends on many of us, not just on the few who are destined to be extraordinary" (2001, p. 2). Culture is built through shared experiences and language. Structuring the culture of a school such that quality is the focus leads to increased achievement. To do this, we draw on proven organizational responses to create that structure.

Proven Organizational Responses

In this book, we suggest a set of structures that we believe are needed to align actions and performance with the mission. Many of these structures are drawn from a variety of provocative and proven educational and business leaders. These include the works of bestselling authors, reports from recognized researchers, and analyses of highly successful organizations. Of note are structures we draw from Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award–winning organizations. According to their website (http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/about/index.cfm), Baldrige is federally funded and organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Baldrige group is "the nation's public-private partnership dedicated to performance excellence." Baldrige recognizes organizations in different sectors, including education, health care, manufacturing, nonprofit/government, service, and small business. For the education sector, there are seven areas of concentration:

1. Leadership
2. Strategic Planning
3. Customer Focus
4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
5. Workforce Focus
6. Operations Focus
7. Results

It is worth noting that the education sector of Baldrige includes a focus on the customer. While this term is most often used in business communities, the Baldrige team understands that there are a number of different customers in a school learning community. Obviously, this includes the student. But it should also include family members, teachers, staff, administrators, and community members. The culture of the school has to serve all of the customers well, not just one group.

One of our doctoral students, Cindy Lewis, who works for the San Diego Municipal Airport and is responsible for professional development, devoted her dissertation to the study of Baldrige award–winning organizations. She examined five different winners from five different sectors. She found that these diverse organizations shared a number of common practices in their quest for excellence. We contend that these organizations purposefully developed strategic plans to operationalize the organizations they wanted to emmulate. They used a series of structures to bring their mission to life. These organizations did not leave the development of their culture to chance. And we believe effective schools can do no less.

Action Research

We respond to the need for a balanced investment in thoughtful reflection, planning, and implementation using Stringer's (2007) action research process. His "look, think, act, and look again" design provides for a dynamic cycle of ongoing and continuous improvement. It provides a cycle in which action is the expected response to thoughtful reflection and responsive planning. If mission building and revisiting is designed as a pivotal and integral driver of a school's ongoing implementation revolution, it is unlikely that the mission will be treated as something you did two years ago in a hotel meeting room. Instead teachers, parents, students, and community partners will know your mission, see your vision, and better understand your actions, interactions, investments, and decisions.

As Stringer noted in his community development work with Aboriginal people, action research encourages practitioners to collect information, analyze that information, make decisions, and then begin the process again. Stringer's work also emphasizes the various ways in which data can be collected and serves as a reminder not to limit information sources to norm-referenced student performance. Although action research can be conducted by individuals, the cycle of continually examining data and making decisions is also consistent with the idea that groups can consider larger data sets and make bigger changes in their school and its culture (Calhoun, 1999).

In each chapter of this book, we provide tools that can be used in the action research cycle. There are more tools than you will probably use in a given school year. You will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Creating Culture in Schools
• Chapter 2. Welcome
• Chapter 3. Do No Harm
• Chapter 4. Choice Words
• Chapter 5. It's Never Too Late to Learn
• Chapter 6. Best School in the Universe
• Chapter 7. Enacting the Culture of Achievement
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Action Research Tools
• References
• Related ASCD Resources: School Culture
• About the Authors
• Study Guide
• Copyright