Positive vs. Negative School Cultures

By John S. Bell

How can you create a school culture to embrace learning?  Are you up for a challenge to reap rewards for your staff and students?  John S. Bell describes what successful leaders do.

Negative Begets Negative

It stands to reason that if school cultures have systems that are built by scaffolding one structure onto another over time, then negative cultures are built by scaffolding negative structures onto another over time. A policy that negatively impacts the learning environment is likely to negatively impact the attitudes of those who value learning in the school. This impact may create negative feelings in those who value learning toward those who made the negative policy. Negative begets negative. If left to scaffold unabated, the negatives become the school culture. Integrated systems are connected, and to tamper with one part impacts many others. Unfortunately, the removal of one negative part of the school culture does not start a chain reaction that removes all others. Negative cultures are highly integrated and are certainly tied to human behavior at its worst. Negative school cultures create negative artifacts, negative attitudes, negative speech, and negative thoughts.

Negative is as Negative Does

Richard Elmore’s latest research indicates that one must change human behavior first before attempting to change the culture. The leader who understands this idea is more likely to understand that one must not only dream of a more positive culture, but expect that there will be one. Part of the expectation is that the people in the culture will behave in a way that supports positive outcomes. The school leader who allows negative speech, thoughts, and attitudes to continue is one who really does not expect the culture to become more positive. Certainly this is not to say that the leader can command a positive culture and expect it appear. But what we do mean is that no leader can expect to help develop a positive school culture if negative attributes are allowed to flourish and grow. The following are some fairly easy steps leaders can take to determine if negative is begetting negative in the school:

• For one-week become a negative/positive gauge. The leader who listens, watches, and quietly records that which is negative and that which is positive in the school may find that negative attitudes, decisions, artifacts, and thoughts far outweigh positive ones. As a caring leader, quietly record what you see, hear, and feel that is both positive and negative during the school day. Now it is true that the principal is a magnet for the negative. Principals hear and deal with problems all day. It may be that you should enlist a couple of other trusted colleagues to gauge with you. Simply make two columns on a pad in your office; one for negative, one for positive things that you notice each day for a week. Don’t take the pad with you as you are in the building. Instead, remember the positive and negative things that you see and hear and jot them down in the appropriate column when you return to your office. At the end of the week you should have a pretty accurate reading of the negative/positive temperature of the school. Be careful not to make judgments about whether the negative event could have been avoided. Just record everything in the negative or positive column. Hopefully the results will yield a positive culture. However, many leaders find that the exercise at the least reveals many things that can be improved. 
  
• Run an acid test on the school mission statement. Another initial step for determining if the school culture is positive or negative is to dissect the school mission statement. Divide the faculty into equal teams of no fewer than 5 and no more than 11 people depending on faculty size. Place the school mission statement before the teams on a PowerPoint or large poster. You might also want to give each team copies of the mission so that they can write if they need to do so. Tell each team to imagine that they are a visiting review team and their job is to dissect the mission statement to check for alignment between what the school says it believes and the practices, structures, and artifacts that indicate alignment in the school with the mission. Explain that the faculty teams are pretending to be a review team but that they have more knowledge about the school than any review team could gather in a short visit. Each team should use its knowledge of the school to see how well equipped the school is to support the mission. We have included an example to show how much data one might collect while doing this simple process. The point is that if there is misalignment between the school mission and the actions of those who must insure that the mission is met, then a negative school culture has a foundation on which to scaffold a negative skyscraper.

Example:

Mission of XYZ School: 
To meet the challenge of the twenty-first century, XYZ School will develop each student’s academic, social, physical, and emotional potential in a safe, supportive learning environment, creating successful and productive citizens in a multicultural and technologically oriented society.

Key terms:

• challenges of twenty-first century
• develop student’s
• academic
• social
• physical
• emotional
• safe
• supportive
• learning environment
• successful
• productive citizens
• multicultural
• technologically oriented
• society

In this first step of dissecting the mission, one isolates key words that have implications for adult practice in the school. Obviously, Twenty-First Century has many implications. Schools whose faculty members are not completely technologically proficient have spent little time trying to understand what “preparing students for the twenty-first century” really means. Having those words in school mission statements was all the rage in the late 90’s and 2000. In far too many schools in America, the students even in early grades are far more technologically proficient than the adults who teach them. In some school cultures adults almost brag about how technologically incompetent they are as compared to their students. Prepare students for the twenty-first century? Other kinds of questions one might ask related to sample mission statement are:

Academic and physical development are usually expected functions in schools. Which adults at XYZ School are responsible for social and emotional development?

Productive citizenship is often seen as an automatic outcome of schooling. It is not. Which adults in the building have the responsibility for creating strong citizens? How will they accomplish this task? How will they know when they do?

What is the definition of multicultural at XYZ School? Do most adults point to the ELL teacher or the foreign language teacher when multiculturalism is mentioned? Have any adults in the building had in depth training in what multiculturalism really means?

The faculty review teams should spend several sessions really analyzing what their school mission statement says and how equipped the school is to carry out the mission. The above kind of questioning will drill down to what is meant and what matters.

Top-Notch or Toxic

The Southern Regional Education Board describes vividly the difference between negative and positive cultures. Using the terms Top-Notch and Toxic the module describes attributes found in both kinds of cultures as follows:

In what kind of environment do you work?  How will you effect change for the benefit of your colleagues and students?  Reflect on these ideas and post your comments in the RAPSA Lounge.

John S. Bell is Coordinator of the Office of Leadership Development at the Alabama Department of Education.  John is co-author of From At Risk to Academic Excellence: What Successful Leaders Do, published by Eye on Education.