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Five Elements of Positive School Culture: Learning from Dr. Bridwell-Mitchell

Leah Shafer, contributive writer for Usable Knowledge, wrote a popular article about promoting positive school culture. In this brief article, Shafer offers salient, practical methods to increase positive culture in your school.

The article discusses the difficulty of labeling “school culture.” While most principals may have an instinctual awareness of their school’s culture, one would be hard-pressed to define why. That is, according to Shafer, “amid the push for tangible outcomes like higher test scores and graduation rates, it can be tempting to think that school culture is just too vague… [school culture is] tricky to define, and parsing its components can be challenging.”

According to Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell, an expert in education leadership and management, “researchers who have studied culture have tracked and demonstrated a strong and significant correlation between organizational culture and an organization’s performance.” As such, once principals can define “culture,” then they can begin to design and implement “a cultural vision.”

Bridwell-Mitchell argues that the strength of a culture stems from interactions between people within an organization:

“In a strong culture, there are many, overlapping, and cohesive interactions among all members of the organization… In a weak culture, sparse interactions make it difficult for people to learn the organization’s culture, so its character is barely noticeable and the commitment to it is scarce or sporadic.”

Methods of communication are vital for a strong school culture. When leaders can speak directly and with ease to school staff, and vice versa, “beliefs, values, and actions will spread the farthest and be tightly reinforced.”

To conclude, Shafer claims that a good school culture relies on direct and indirect messages. In a positive school culture, all school staff should send and receive messages rooted in “collaboration, honesty, and hard work.”

For practical application, Bridwell-Mitchell offers a five-step, cyclical model. These five elements comprise school culture; each informs and drives each other:

  1. Fundamental beliefs and assumptions, or the things that people at your school consider to be true. For example: “All students have the potential to succeed,” or “Teaching is a team sport.”
  2. Shared values, or the judgments people at your school make about those belief and assumptions — whether they are right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust. For example: “It’s wrong that some of our kindergarteners may not receive the same opportunity to graduate from a four-year college,” or “The right thing is for our teachers to be collaborating with colleagues every step of the way.”
  3. Norms, or how members believe they should act and behave, or what they think is expected of them. For example: “We should talk often and early to parents of young students about what it will take for their children to attend college.” “We all should be present and engaged at our weekly grade-level meetings.”
  4. Patterns and behaviors, or the way people actually act and behave in your school. For example: There are regularly-scheduled parent engagement nights around college; there is active participation at weekly team curriculum meetings. (But in a weak culture, these patterns and behaviors can be different than the norms.)
  5. Tangible evidence, or the physical, visual, auditory, or other sensory signs that demonstrate the behaviors of the people in your school. For example: Prominently displayed posters showcasing the district’s college enrollment, or a full parking lot an hour before school begins on the mornings when curriculum teams meet.

-Melissa Hoppie, Graduate Research Assistant

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TWIN-CS

TWIN-CS advances the Catholic tradition of academic excellence by empowering Catholic schools to systematically transform from a monolingual to multilingual educational model in the service of vibrant culturally diverse populations.

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