HOW DO YOU DISCERN AND NURTURE THE CULTURE OF A SCHOOL?
Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting a school I had not visited before. From the moment I fronted Reception, from my welcome from the Principal and from the staff I encountered, and from my growing sense of the quality of the student experience as I toured the campus, I knew this school had a strong, cohesive culture. How did I know? I felt it. I just felt it!
Rev Stuart Taylor, former Executive Director of The Bloxham Project in the UK, whose career took him to many leading UK schools as he worked with Chaplains and Pastoral Care leaders, said he used to be able to judge a school’s culture from the state of its Notice Boards.
How do you discern a school’s culture? How do you know you’re in a school that has a strong, cohesive culture?
Do you judge it from its website? From the public declarations and declamations of the Principal? From the appearance of its students in public, or from their behaviour on public transport? From its photos of appealing, smiling students and its slogans on its fleet of buses as they swing past you on the way to work?
Experienced English and Drama teacher and Assistant Principal Alden Blodget writes that what people say or publish about their school does not constitute its culture. When it comes to School Culture, words aren’t enough, he writes, (on ascd, 9 Feb 2023).
Although educational leaders may believe the culture of their school supports learning, community, and safety, Blodget asserts, their perceptions of their school’s culture do not always match the experiences of the students or even the adults ,who learn and teach there. For Blodget, schools have unique cultures which are underpinned by their particular beliefs, values, goals, and behavioural norms - cultures that can be described on a continuum from nurturing to toxic. An increase in cases of depression, instances of suicide, and violence among students, including the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, highlight the importance of creating the healthiest school cultures possible, Blodget says. Our own recent experiences in Australia too of increased mental health declines among school-aged children manifesting in increased anxiety and depression also testify to the need here for school cultures to be nurturing, supportive and cohesive.
Blodget suggests that the process of defining and creating a healthy culture generally begins with a deliberate and intentional clarification and articulation of the school’s shared values, and then writing a mission statement that is based upon and reflects those values. Educators can spend hours debating and selecting just the right words, Blodget concedes, adding that they might discuss the significant differences between "tolerance" or "acceptance" and "inclusion" or "belonging."
Given educators’ shared goals of creating thriving, high-achieving schools, it is not surprising that they tend to select many of the same words as they attempt to enumerate the qualities their school culture embraces, words such as excellence, innovation, risk-taking, depth, creativity, empathy, wellness, life-long learners, and the like. Once these bench-mark words are hammered into handbooks and websites, Blodget notes, - and emblazoned on the schools’ buses, it might be added - it's tempting for the adults to believe that these aspirations capture the culture of the school.
But, - Blodget reaches the crux of his argument - of course, what matters more than the words themselves is their embodiment in actions, practices, and policies that create the culture. And then, how each person—students, teachers, staff—actually experiences the culture determines the degree to which reality reflects a mission statement. Then he adds, crucially - Unfortunately, schools often conflate their words with reality.
Misalignment of Stated Values with Actual Culture – The Gap between Rhetoric and Observed Action
So many dutifully and beautifully drafted School Mission Statements remain encased in School Prospectuses and rest in countless Principals’ desk bottom drawers. Equally carefully crafted framed plaques listing Our School’s Values hang largely overlooked and unread on classroom and corridor walls. Clarifying your values and writing your Mission Statement are certainly important first steps, as Blodget acknowledges, but the steps that come next will shape the actual culture, he affirms.
So, what are the next steps?
Blodget asks, What do we mean when we claim academic excellence as an attribute of a school's culture? Are our aspirations supported by our actual day-to-day practices?
A closer look at a school’s culture might reveal that its structures and practices communicate an emphasis on marks over learning, despite a statement in the Mission Statement that the school purports to cultivate lifelong learning and deep thinking. The existence of honour rolls and awards assemblies, the conversations about exam marks and test scores that take place in the college counselling office, and the respect with which students with high grades are treated in classrooms compared to those with lower grades — all these might be factors in creating a school culture much different from the one espoused by educators, Blodget bluntly points out.
Other elements of the way a school works, including its traditions, policies, and routines, need the same scrutiny to determine if they are likely to support or negate the ideals represented in the Mission Statement. Blodget shares that this need for scrutiny was cogently illustrated in the voices of a students who responded to open-ended questions about their experiences at one high school where he taught. Some of the responses were written specifically to him; some were oral responses to a teacher who posed questions in a class discussion that he recorded; and one was posted publicly on Instagram:
I think I figured out somewhere pretty early on that school was a game where the goal was to get the highest grades with the least amount of effort. I don't know if this attitude was particularly conducive to learning. Another said, Well, we?are?teenagers. We know that universities look at results. Thirty years from now, I'm not going to need what I learn in History class, but right now, I need to know it for the marks. That's the drive behind everything — needing the marks. His classmate admitted, If we have homework and we can flip the pages back and forth and get the answer, we are going to do it. We get hours of homework every night, and we want to get done what we can fast. If we can short-change something else, get it done quicker, we're going to do it.
A third student posted an Instagram comment about the pain he endured as a student of colour at his school, which revealed the chasm between reality and the school's written commitment to community and respectful dialogue: I would constantly hear students use the n-word around me or say it directly to me. I would always try to gain up the strength to explain why they shouldn't be saying that. Nobody ever listened. It was exhausting and demoralising to know that I was surrounded by people who wouldn't care about how they hurt me.
Blodget notes that the words these students used certainly clashed with the lofty claims the school made to describe its values: “excellence in academics,” “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “respectful dialogue,” and “community.” The students’ words capture the conflict between aspiration and experience that is present in many schools, he said, continuing, In fact, the students’ words challenge educators to look more closely at the relationship between mission and reality. During my years working in six different schools, I regret to say we never truly explored this mismatch, and, based on my conversations with colleagues in other schools, I believe this neglect is not uncommon.
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Assessing School Culture
Of course, striving as adults to align a Mission Statement and a set of values with practices and policies offers no guarantee that students will experience the culture as we hope, Blodget concedes. Equally essential is creating a structure for monitoring the culture. Although the specific process will vary from school to school, Blodget suggests one strategy might be to establish a permanent race- and gender-representative committee, for example: two students, two teachers, two administrators, two staff members, and one board member, charged with ensuring the alignment of mission and reality by designing and leading an annual cultural review process.
The goal of this process would be to gain insight into how those within the institution experience its culture, Blodget explains. He avers that the only meaningful way to understand students' perceptions of the culture is to ask them — to give them time to respond to open-ended questions, using a combination of written responses and one-on-one conversations with an adult. Blodget argues that surveys (closed questions that ask for numerical ratings or strong agreement/disagreement) are not as effective because they don’t allow for emotional, interpersonal engagement, nuanced explanation, and deeper exploration — all of which can be important in counteracting the propensity for adolescents to say what they think adults want to hear and for adults to hear what they want to hear.
Conversation, especially, can move adults closer to the intricacies and subtleties of truth, Blodget attests, adding that even chatting with those whose experiences seem aligned with a school's mission can be helpful to learn more about the sources of structural support they experience. Because having these conversations requires mutual trust and respect, the review committee will need to involve many of the adults in the school in the follow-up interviews with selected students. Advisors, teachers, and administrators are likely to be the most effective having candid conversations with students with whom they already have close relationships.
Blodget claims that conversations such as these can provide important insight into the many factors that affect a school’s culture, including outside influences. Sounding a cautionary note, he acknowledges that while schools are not ivory towers immured from society, their Mission and Values Statements reflect an idealistic desire to create an environment free of much of the nastiness of the world. But schools contain people, and people bring with them the behaviours and values of society. Students can be quite good at hiding these behaviours by operating during hours and in places invisible to adults, including online. After all, a school has its young people within its walls for as little as eight hours a day, and that only for five days a week and maybe forty weeks of the year. Young people inhabit a world outside school that is mystifying and invisible to many adults.
As he says, while glimpses into this world will likely remain few, the conversations during the culture-review process can provide some awareness of how events outside of school grounds influence students' experiences of the school culture, noting that while educators can talk all they want about kindness and wellness and inclusion, act as role models, praise the good behaviour they do see, and convince themselves that all is well, they cannot address problems they cannot see.
Yet, Blodget says, most educators know all this, so it is puzzling that so many are surprised by those moments when teachers are revealed as abusers, when star students are caught selling drugs or bullying, or when parents help children cheat. Identifying and combating outside forces that threaten school culture is a challenge that must be intentionally embraced in candid discussions, and, by extension, time in school must be provided for them to take place.
Identifying and Assessing the Impact of Outside Influences
One outside factor deserves particular exploration: the effect of external examinations – and notably in Australian schools, the largely media-driven hype surrounding the significance of NAPLAN Test Results and of the ATAR score a student may gain - impacts negatively on the ability of schools to attain their aspirations for creating a healthy academic environment consistent with current research into the science of learning. Students should not experience the claim of "excellence in academics" in mission statements as a cynical mark-grubbing "game" whose reward is an ATAR Score but whose effect is antithetical to learning, Blodget states indignantly. Blodget argues that this adverse impact on a Mission and on Values a school holds dear point to a need to rethink and redesign K-12 education.
He is realistic, however, allowing that unfortunately, the freedom to explore truly fundamental change is restricted by tertiary admission expectations that lock schools into, for example, the traditional distribution of graduation requirements: six years of English, not less than four years of Maths, etc. Writing from America, Blodget rues the fact that too many students experience high school as a pressure cooker for college-induced resume-building—high GPAs and SATs, arrays of APs, lists of sports and other activities. The results, even before the additional stresses of COVID, are that increasing numbers of young people arrive in college already burned out.
Refreshingly, in recent years Australian universities have embraced a far broader array of admissions procedures that recognise alongside the need for satisfactory academic results, the undoubted high value of involvement in co-curricular cultural, sporting and community service activities throughout high school, together with provision for students with specific physical, intellectual or socio-economic disadvantage that permits student who might not otherwise have the opportunity to embark on tertiary courses for which they are suited without having to be measured solely by the ATAR they attain. But the adverse impact of unreasonable parental and institutional influence over the education of young people imposed by perceived social standing of prospective careers, linked with limiting assessment of their capability to their ranked academic performance, stifles individual endeavour and may impedes their capacity to make their optimum contribution to society.
According to Blodget, school educators need to be freed from university entry scores so that they may radically rethink not just graduation requirements but the many other university-influenced traditional policies and practices that adversely affect the capacity of a school’s culture properly and completely nurture their students to a satisfying and fulfilling young adulthood.
Once a Culture Review Committee has gathered all this information, its next step is to analyse the degree to which intention, design, and reality coincide, Blodget suggests, asking, Which students experience the culture positively? Which do not? What systemic obstacles exist? What outside forces require strategic engagement? Would any of the various constituents of the school benefit from more active attention or involvement?
In Blodget’s model, the committee would create for the Head of School and School Board an annual report on the state of the school’s Mission — with specific recommendations for needed improvements. Ideally, given their role as “guardians of the school’s mission,” the Head and board members will also read all the written responses generated during the assessment and, to the extent possible, might participate in some of the follow-up conversations, Blodget adds.
What about the Teachers’ Experiences within the School Culture?
Understanding how teachers experience school culture is also essential. In a recent essay posted on the National Association of Independent Schools’?Independent Ideas?blog, Brent Kaneft, Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, wrote, There is no world where a teacher’s performance and a student’s performance are separable. . .?Teacher wellness is so crucial because it is interdependent with student wellness and with the health of the entire school community.
Blodget agrees. For him, teacher wellbeing, which is dependent on feeling valued, is intimately connected to school culture. High teacher morale lays the foundation for strong faculty-student relationships and a positive culture, he says. Over the past few years, research studies have shown that one of the main factors in teacher shortages is frustration over not being consulted or heard. Teachers working in truly democratic schools seem to be happier, Blodget claims. Their voices matter in making decisions affecting the work they do with students—decisions about curriculum or changes in structures, policies, and practices, he continues. In faculty meetings too, these teachers feel encouraged to present ideas that challenge the status quo, to disagree and debate (collegially and civilly) with each other and with administrators and to vote on whether to adopt or reject new structural or policy initiatives. These teachers are more likely to have some control over their working life. The healthier they are, the healthier their students are.
Unsurprisingly, Blodget urges that It is essential that the review committee design a cultural assessment process for them too, in order to understand how the adults in a school are experiencing its culture. Blodget suggests an effective process will include written responses to open-ended questions and, as time allows, follow-up conversations conducted by administrators (principals, school heads, deans of faculty, and board members). Rightly, he indicates that Board members and school heads need to understand the experiences of the adults who interact with students because those interactions will co-create the culture.
Why it Matters
The sheer integrity and credibility of a school is dependent upon its ability to live out its values and on its achieving what its Mission Statement claims — that its ideals are demonstrably evident and are embodied in reality. In other words, a school’s standing in the wider community is determined by the extent to which its Mission and Values are everywhere present not only in the form of words oral and written, but also consistently in the behaviour and actions of all the people present in its learning community – students, staff, administrators and leaders. The wellbeing of our children and our teachers depends on it, Blodget concludes.