Session 3

Reading and Shaping School Culture

          Each and every school comes equipped with a strong, existing culture.  This invisible, but powerful, force is perhaps the primary determiner of success for a school’s improvement efforts.  It is cruelly ironic that most school leaders were selected for their positions based on their abilities to produce real, tangible results; designing a school schedule, supervising employees, enforcing school discipline, or balancing a budget.  However, beginning on day one of the job as school leader, the primary factor for success is no longer tangible.  It is the leader’s ability to understand, assess, and positively shape the intangible, but all-powerful, force that either fuels or freezes a school’s improvement efforts...school culture.        

Participants in this session will:  1.  Gain a clearer understanding of the nature and power of school culture by identifying, describing, and analyzing unusually powerful non-school organizational cultures.  2.  Demonstrate the ability to understand, read, and assess current school or district culture by applying specific culture assessment criteria.  3.  Understand the “elements” which have, over time, shaped the current school culture and design culture re-shaping  strategies using these “elements of culture.“