Shaping School Culture

Terrence E. Deal, Kent D. Peterson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119210221
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

The most trusted guide to school culture, updated with current challenges and new solutions

Shaping School Culture is the classic guide to exceptional school leadership, featuring concrete guidance on influencing the subtle symbolic features of schools that provide meaning, belief, and faith. Written by renowned experts in the area of school culture, this book tackles the increasing challenges facing public schools and provides clear, candid suggestions for more effective symbolic leadership. This new third edition has been revised to reflect the reality of schools today, including the increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, federal reforms such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state sponsored improvement programs, and other major issues that impact organizational culture and the role of school leaders. Each chapter features new examples and cases that illustrate persistent problems, spelling out key cultural implications and offering concrete examples of overcoming the challenges while maintaining a meaningful learning environment. The chapter on toxic schools continues to provide the field's most trusted advice on navigating this rocky terrain, and the discussion's focus on how to manage negativity remains especially integral to besieged school administrators across the U.S.

Recent years have jolted the nation's school system with a number of new developments that spell problems for the cultural tapestry of schools. This book provides expert perspective and sage, doable advice for administrators tending to external pressures while sustainingor evolvinga more positive school culture.

• Navigate new challenges including Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and waning confidence and faith
• Turn around a toxic school culture with confidence and success
• Foster a culture of passion, purpose, and meaning
• Adopt a more active form of symbolic leadership to support students, faculty, staff, parents, and community

Test scores as the primary metric, relentless reforms, waning public support, and timid initiatives wrapped in bureaucratic packaging: while among the most prominent issues administrators face are only the tip of the iceberg. Shaping School Culture charts a route through competing pressures to help educational leaders hew a positive learning environment for schools.

Part I

The Elements of Culture

Chapter 1
Schools as Tribes
The Power to Transform

You are truly home only when you find your tribe.

—Srividya Srinivasan

The tiny community of Ganado is in northeast Arizona's high desert. It is nestled in the midst of an expansive reservation twenty-seven miles from Window Rock—the largest town in Navajo lands. This is picturesque country, dry and beautiful, dotted with traditional hogans and small homes. To outsiders, the town of Ganado would be one of the last places expected to house an award-winning elementary school. The town has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Forty-six percent of the families do not have running water, and 35 percent across the district's one thousand square miles have no access to electricity. Despite the odds, Ganado Primary School is the town's pride and joy and has been continually recognized for its excellence.

Our early editions featured the special ethos of Ganado Primary based on our visits, examination of documents, and interviews with students, parents, faculty members, and Sigmund Boloz, the school's principal for almost twenty years. It continues to be an excellent portrait of a powerful school culture. Ganado Primary was identified as a School of Excellence in 1997, received the Arizona A+ award three times, and persists in serving its students and community with a dedicated professional community and unique culture. The school continues Boloz's tradition of success secured by a strong positive culture.

Ganado Primary School: A Desert Jewel

The school's large, modern building is centrally located, visible from the main road and the small town. Its color blends with the high desert and fits well with the history and spirit of the community. The school's entry courtyard features a small-scale sculptural likeness of Spider Rock—a spiritually significant, eight-hundred-foot vertical sandstone pinnacle rising from Canyon de Chelly. The sculpture beckons students to enter a way of life that involves a deep sense of community history and traditions, an unwavering present-day focus on learning and literacy, and a lucid image of the future.

The school was not always a source of community pride. In 1980, Ganado Primary had one of the worst school buildings in Arizona. Designing and constructing the new school was the beginning of a new identity: a distinctive set of cultural ways and practices that are anchored in tradition but still embrace modern standards. The school's ethos engages teachers in ongoing learning about their craft, communicates high expectations for students through lively programs and celebrations, and involves parents as equal partners in the learning experience.

It also envelops students with symbols, support, and significant others as they go about their business of growing and learning. The combined symbols of student achievement and Navajo traditions make the environment caring and meaningful. The fusion of modern practices and ancient tribal ways connects the school historically and organically with the local community.

A walk through Ganado reveals a visual portrayal of the school's cultural values and traditions. A visitor entering the school experiences an inviting, open area dominated by the depiction of Spider Rock. More than mere adornment, the replica represents a sacred place and time in Navajo history. According to local mythology, the actual column of sandstone in Canyon de Chelly is where Spider Woman gave the Navajo the knowledge of weaving. Today, this symbolic spire signifies that Ganado Primary is a historically anchored, sacred place that conveys knowledge and skills that are part and parcel of being a Navajo. It signals to the community that the school is part of its heritage, traditions, and future, a symbol of respect and appreciation for Navajo ways.

Inside the building, one immediately is struck by a massive red Ganado Navajo rug hanging in the front hallway. The rug—woven in the distinctive Ganado style—pulls one into the unique Navajo way of life. It is beautiful, complex, and emotionally warming. It draws you into an image of community and school working together in harmony. Nearby walls are adorned with awards for educational excellence won by staff members and students, as well as academic work demonstrating a wide array of student accomplishments. But, fitting local values, displays are a symbol of community pride—neither boastful nor excessive.

The school's architecture and design blend symbol and purpose. The school was designed collaboratively with architects to serve educational needs and to send an emblematic message. It is a fusion of modern educational equipment and methods with symbols of the traditional ways of the Navajo people. The school is configured in four units or quadrants. Each quadrant houses a team of teachers and a cohort of students—designs that reinforce the closeness of staff members and makes students feel part of a cohesive group.

Each quadrant denotes one of the tribe's four sacred directions and represents a core value. The east is associated with white, dawn, spring, critical thinking, and a clear mind. The south is associated with blue, daylight, and summer, one's purpose in life, the roles of staff members, and the importance of keeping oneself nourished. The west is identified with yellow, twilight, fall, the waning of light, suppertime, and interpersonal relationships and connections. The north is associated with black, night, winter, the importance of respect and reverence, personal values, and how life fits together in harmony (Witherspoon, 1995, p. 13; personal conversation with Sigmund Boloz, 2008). The deeper meanings of these four cardinal directions play out in the school and reinforce the learning and social mission of the school.

At Ganado, dawn is celebrated through the start of the day and the opening of school. Daylight and summer represent growth and sunlight; one's learning roles during the day. Twilight reminds one of relationships in the school and within family. Night reinforces the importance of reflection and contemplation, an important element to planning and thoughtfulness. The four quadrants are represented throughout the school in the colors of the blinds in each classroom and in stories told and retold in group settings. All these elements—architecture, mission, tradition, colors, stories, and relationships—combine to form the Ganado culture.

Other unique architectural features also reinforce cultural and instructional values of Ganado. For example, the library is located in the center of the building, a point signaling the centrality of literacy. It displays thousands of books in open view as students travel from one part of the school to another. Writing displays reinforce literacy. Small reading corners invite students to curl up with a book. Hallways are airy and light. A room used for meetings, reflection, and community gatherings is shaped in the form of a Hogan—an ancient Navajo home design with deep symbolic significance, still common in rural areas.

In the meeting room, traditional wooden posts holding up the ceiling seem perfectly in harmony with modern paraphernalia: books, tablets, camcorders, and computers. It reinforces the harmony of school and community.

Hallways are adorned with numerous expertly hung Navajo rugs woven in the red geometric design favored by local weavers. The rug represents “quality, attention to detail, care, skills, learning, creativity, and tradition” (personal conversation with Sigmund Boloz, 2008), all values of the school. The floor in the lunchroom mirrors the patterns in the Ganado rug on display in the foyer—again reinforcing cultural traditions and tying the school together with common themes.

Architecture and artifacts vividly represent the school's core values and basic beliefs as embodied in the school's mission statement during Boloz's years:

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The Ganado Primary School's mission is to provide opportunities for children to make sense of their world, to respect themselves and others, to respect their environment, and to appreciate and understand their cultural and linguistic heritage. Children, teachers, and administrators all bring varying points of view, resources, expectations of and assumptions about the world, and ways of dealing with their daily circumstances. Our mission is to help everyone negotiate their experiences with the content of the classroom, instructional style, and the social, emotional, physical, and professional interactions of school life. We believe that a relaxed atmosphere where surprise, challenge, hard work, celebration, humor, satisfaction, and collegiality is the natural order of the day for all.

Care must be taken to ensure that sound philosophical, developmental, and cultural understandings of children are at the heart of decision making in the classroom and the school. The question, “What is it like to be a child?” underlies staff development, matters of curriculum, parent involvement, and instructional approaches. “What is it like to be a teacher?” is an equally valid question. What is true about our mission to children is true for teachers and staff as well.

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The school's mission is reflected in a piece written in 1997 by then-principal Sigmund Boloz. It sketches a portrait of his core obligations.

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The C Diet

My job is

1. to keep the compass
2. to massage change
3. to build credibility: a positive image for the school in the eyes of the community
4. to cultivate my staff
5. to ask the compelling questions
6. to be an advocate for children
7. I build the culture of the school
8. curriculum consensus constituents community
9. I see my job as building my staff. I strive to build:
10. confidence in themselves, in their decisions, and in their teaching
11. courage to take risks and to break new ground
12. compassion for children and others
13. character to always do their personal best
14. competence that they know the current trends
15. capacity to learn new things
16. commitment to our mission
17. clarity a good focus on the whats and the hows
18. consciousness to bring thinking to a higher level
19. communication open lines of dialog
20. collaboration share expertise
21. connectedness bonding to each other and our mission
22. collegiality professional interactions
23. challenge to keep staff on their cutting edge
24. critical thinking thoughtfulness
25. creativity to implement innovations
26. curiosity actively seek better ways
27. contentment feel accepted

Copyright © Sigmund A. Boloz, 1997; reprinted with permission.

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Other key values are played out in the culture of Ganado. Central among Navajo educators is the importance of honoring relationships and harboring a deep feeling of moral responsibility to oneself and to others. In addition, in Navajo culture all tribal members are to work toward “living well” in harmony and balance. As Eder (2007) notes, living well means “…wholeness; continuity of generations; one's relationship to the beginning, to the past and to the universe; responsibility to future generations; life force; and completeness” (p. 279). As we have seen, these are core values of Ganad...