School Culture: Leading for our Students

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School Culture Leading for our Students

• Colorado Critical Friends and BVSD Partners

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Hargreaves and Fullan

• What is worth fighting for is not to allow our
  organizations to be negative by default, but to
  make them positive by design.
• --- Hargreaves and Fullan
• Whats Worth Fighting for in Your School

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Essential Questions

• What kinds of school cultures are most supportive
  of teacher growth, student learning and school
  improvement?
• And how do we establish cultures that support
  positive change among teachers and students?

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Two types of cultures

• Individualistic Stuck schools
• Learning impoverished
• Institutionalized conservatism

• Collaborative Moving schools
• Learning enriched
• Linked with continuous improvement

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• . . It is far easier to learn to teach and to
  learn to teach better in some schools than in
  others.
• -- Rosenholtz

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Collaboration Joint work

• Deepens collaboration
• Leads to stronger interdependence
• Nurtures shared responsibility and collective
  commitment
• We support those activities that we help to
  create. Margaret Wheatley

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When teachers take collective responsibility for
students, they conceive their work to be a joint
enterprise. They have a higher sense of personal
and collective efficacy and assume that learning
is a result of school rather than nonschool
factors. In high schools where this sense of
collective responsibility was strong, students
made larger gains in mathematics, reading,
history, and science than in schools where the
collective sense was weaker. These outcomes were
especially true for minority students and
students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
Garmston and Wellman (The Adaptive School, p 16).
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Characteristics of collaborative cultures

• Pervasive attitudes and behaviors--help, support,
  trust, openness-- are imbued within the school
  community
• Jokes, celebrations, recognitions are a regular
  part of school routine
• Failure and uncertainty are shared and discussed
• Note none of this can be mandated -- rather can
  only be encouraged

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Disagreement in Communities

• Ironically, disagreement is stronger and more
  frequent in schools with collaborative cultures
  than it is elsewhere, as purposes, values, and
  their relationship to practice are discussed.
• --- Hargreaves and Fullan

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What is community?

• Community
• Deep respect for others
• Authentic listening for the needs of the other
  people in this community
• Presenting who we really are

• Pseudo community
• Playing nice
• Being safe
• Presenting the most favorable sides of our
  personalities.

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The role of leaders

• Work with the pull to control the nature of
  collaboration
• Create the conditions that lead to authentic
  collaboration
• Must trust staff and not overly control
• Recognize that a collaborative culture evolves
  over time

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Warning Not all collaborations are equal!

• Balkanization
• Comfortable collaboration
• Contrived collegiality

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Balkanization (refers to divisions of communities
into isolated states as occurred in an area of
Europe identified as the Balkans)

• A culture made up of separate groups jockeying
  for position and supremacy
• Teacher loyalties are to the group, rather than
  the whole community
• May lead to groups going their own ways
• little continuity in monitoring student progress
• inconsistent expectations, practice and
  standards

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Balkanization, cont

• . . . Like-minded teachers often cluster in
  subgroups that impede school-wide acceptance of
  particular practices and inhibit the open
  discussion that might eventually lead to the
  creation of a whole-school perspective
• --- Hargreaves and Fullan

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Comfortable Collaboration

• Teachers planning together without getting into
  each others classrooms
• Advice-giving, trick-trading, material-sharing
• Norm of privacy stays intact
• Rarely reaches deep down to the grounds, the
  principles or ethics of practice

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Comfortable collaboration

• Pseudo community?

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Moving forward

• But to bite the bullet of fundamental, deep and
  lasting change, improvement efforts should move
  beyond cooperative decision-making and planning,
  sharing experience and resources, and supportive
  interpersonal relationships into join work,
  mutual observation, and focused reflective
  inquiry.
• --- Hargreaves and Fullan

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Contrived Collegiality

• Concern that collaboration leads to
  unpredictability
• Temptation to control, regulate, and tame
• Characterized by formal, specific, bureaucratic
  procedures that require teachers to work together

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Examples of contrived collegiality

• Mandated peer coaching
• Highly regulated mentoring relationships
• Formally scheduled required meetings for
  accountable collaborative work
• Mandated and regulated PLCs or CFGs

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Avoiding contrived collegiality

• Overall, it is better that principals set
  expectations for collegial tasks (through
  discussion and development with teachers) rather
  than expectations for collegial time.
  Over-managing collegiality is something to
  avoid.
• --- Hargreaves and Fullan

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The journey

• Building collaborative cultures involves a long
  developmental journey. There are no easy short
  cuts.
• --- Hargreaves and Fullan