School Culture

“We will move beyond mediocrity only by taking a long hard look at what we do.” (Robert Gordon)

The Culture Builder, by Roland S. Barth

• How to change a toxic school culture
• How to discuss the "nondiscussables" (nondiscussable: the elephant in the living room)
• "The health of a school is inversely proportional to the number of nondiscussables: the fewer nondiscussables, the healthier the school; the more nondiscussables, the more pathology in the school culture." - Roland Barth

How toxic is your teaching and learning environment? Find out with Kaleidoscope's "Culture Continuum."

Organizations only improve “where the truth is told and the brutal facts confronted.” -Jim Collins, From Good to Great

Improving Relationships By Roland S. Barth, ASCD

"The relationships among the educators in a school define all relationships within that school's culture. Teachers and administrators demonstrate all too well a capacity to either enrich or diminish one another's lives and thereby enrich or diminish their schools."

Knowing - Doing Gap: Accountability for Learning: How Teachers and School Leaders Can Take Charge, by Douglas B. Reeves

"Teachers and educational leaders are extraordinarily busy, inundated with demands for more work and better results with fewer resources—and less time... The traditional failures in educational accountability are not born of a lack of knowledge or will. We know what to do, yet decades of research and reform have failed to connect leadership intentions to classroom reality...
The superintendent announced a new vision statement, along with core values and an organizational mission that the entire staff would enthusiastically chant. Nothing happened in the classroom. Millions were spent on new technology. Nothing happened in the classroom... Staff development programs were adopted so that teachers, like circus animals, would be “trained” to perform new feats. Although seats were dutifully warmed during countless trainings, nothing happened in the classroom. Frustrated by these organizational failures, policymakers finally got tough and decided that accountability was the answer. School systems and individual buildings were rated, ranked, sorted, and humiliated. Sanctions, including job loss or reassignment, and rewards, including thousands of dollars in bonuses, were offered as alternating sticks and carrots, as accountability policies were reduced to artlessly wielded blunt instruments. Yet despite the rhetoric, threats, and promises, nothing happened in the classroom."

We all want to be successful, but we're "more than a little weary at the prospect of implementing one more program, particularly when it is placed on top of other 'proven' programs within the same time constraints."

Key Characteristics of High Performing Schools (ideas and practical strategies for increasing achievement at your school)

High Schools and Middle Schools: Successful Schools: From Research to Action (.pdf), by Willard R. Daggett, Ed.D., International Center for Leadership in Education

Elementary Schools: Inside the Black Box of High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (.pdf), Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence