This guide is designed to help educational leaders reflect on their actions, intentions, and understanding to hone leadership skills as they work to improve their students' learning environment. It provides activities to develop cultural leadership, and deepens and makes concrete the concept of school culture by connecting it to school and student…

Suggests that schools need clear structures and strong, professional cultures to foster teacher learning, describing school culture, positive versus toxic cultures, and staff development. The paper highlights two schools with positive cultures and describes how principals and school leaders shape school culture by reading the culture,…

How educators think about and use time is woven into school cultures. School leaders must learn to read the culture and focus staff development on cultural issues affecting how people use time. This paper discusses cultures that nurture and wound and describes how to shape more nurturing cultures (read the school's culture, assess views of time,…

Designed to explain how principals can shape school culture, this book first discusses current pressures for school reform and the different perspectives on school operations reflected in these reforms. Competing reform strategies are described, specifically, the human resources approach and the structural, political, free market, and school…

Unproductive, toxic schools have fragmented staffs, eroding goals, and negative, hopeless atmospheres. Schools with strong, positive cultures feature service-oriented staffs, a collegial ambience, celebratory rituals, supportive social networks, and humor. In crafting school culture, school leaders (principals, teachers, and parents) act as…

This monograph concentrates on the components of collaborative cultures and how schools develop such collaborative cultures. Urban schools face unique challenges in the frequent lack of resources and the special needs of their often disadvantaged populations. The school culture is a unique quality of the school that is a complex web of norms,…

Illustrates some of the various ways principals may shape and change their school cultures. These cultures are composed of the shared norms, values, beliefs, and assumptions about the world of work that shape how people think, feel, and act. (BJV)

Reforms that strive for educational excellence will fail unless they are meaningfully linked to schools' unique cultures. Chapter 1, "Introduction: The Case for School Culture," discusses the impact of culture on achievement, reform, and learning. Chapter 2, "Schools as Tribes," examines a school that transformed itself through…