Abstract
When presenting a school improvement effort to staff, school leaders encounter a range of responses: some of our teachers roll their eyes whereas others roll up their sleeves. In School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It, Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker provide a ‘how to’ manual for improving your school’s culture illustrated by informative examples and vignettes. School heads and lead teachers concerned with improving a school’s culture would benefit from this quick read.
The book is divided into the three ‘chunks’ mentioned in the title. Chapters 1–4 help us understand the concept of school culture, its key elements, and the difference between culture and climate. Chapters 5 and 6 describe the six different types of school culture and provide tools for assessing your school’s culture. The remainder of the book is devoted to the process of changing school culture. (Warning: if you and your leadership team want to improve your school’s culture, be prepared to be in it for the long haul!)
Knowing the type of school culture you have will help you plan for the school culture you want. Completing the School Culture Typology Activity in chapter 5 as a leadership team or, better yet, as an entire staff allows you to do both without judgment. The results of the School Culture Typology Activity surface both the strong and less sound elements of your school’s culture and can serve as a conversation-starter with staff. Similarly, the School Culture Survey in chapter 6 allows you to assess how collaborative your teachers are in six dimensions: leadership, teacher collaboration, professional development, unity of purpose, collegial support, and learning partnerships. The use of Excel or another spreadsheet program that can regroup the tallied survey responses into these six dimensions and identify the mean and standard deviation for each question is helpful, but not required, for identifying patterns in the data. Taken together, the results of these two tools provide a deeper understanding of your school’s culture. Both the School Culture Typology Activity and the School Culture Survey are also available from the Middle Level Leadership Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia (USA): http://education.missouri.edu/orgs/mllc/3E_ast_school%20culture.php.
The short chapters comprising the remainder of School Culture Rewired are on leading cultural change. Gruenert and Whitaker identify key leverage points and provide advice and strategies for improving school culture, including the formation of a team charged with leading the improvement of the school’s culture (chapter 13). Although most all of these ideas will be familiar territory to school leaders with knowledge of research on school improvement and culture change, these chapters provide valuable guidance for a new leader and a quick review for an experienced one.
Gruenert and Whitaker use a conversational tone throughout the book while highlighting the significant research that undergirds their tools and suggestions. Although some readers may identify truisms or platitudes in places, the authors have written a highly readable text that provides sound advice and a dose of reality in the difficult work of improving a school’s culture.