School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It

Front Cover
ASCD, Jan 16, 2015 - Education - 170 pages

Your school is a lot more than a center of student learning--it also represents a self-contained culture, with traditions and expectations that reflect its unique mission and demographics. In this groundbreaking book, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer tools, strategies, and advice for defining, assessing, and ultimately transforming your school's culture into one that is positive, forward-looking, and actively working to enrich students’ lives. Drawing from decades of research on organizational cultures and school leadership, the authors provide everything you need to optimize both the culture and climate of your school, including

* "Culture-busting" strategies to help teachers adopt positive attitudes, outlooks, and behaviors;
* A framework for pinpointing the type of culture you have, the type that you want, and the actions you need to take to bridge the two;
* Tips for hiring, training, and retaining teachers who will actively work to improve your school's culture; and
* Instructions on how to create and implement a successful School Culture Rewiring Team.

Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school's culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, prosperous or struggling, School Culture Rewired is the ultimate guide to making sure that the culture in your school is guided first and foremost by what's best for your students.

 

Contents

Culture vs Climate
9
Building Blocks and Subcultures
25
What Type of Culture Do You Want?
47
What Type of Culture Do You Have?
65
The School Culture Survey
79
To Reveal the Invisible and Start Conversations
91
The Beat Goes Onor Does It?
107
How Long Does It Take to Rewire a Culture?
119
Leverage Points
133
How the SchoolYear Cycle Affects Cultural Rewiring
145
Building a School Culture Rewiring Team
153
Leadership Matters
161
Bibliography
167
Index
171
About the Authors
177
Copyright

Breakthroughs
125

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About the author (2015)

Steve Gruenert is the department chair of the Educational Leadership department at Indiana State University (ISU). He helped design the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute, has coordinated the Principal Preparation Program at ISU, and has been a principal at both the high school and middle schools levels. His research passion is school culture and climate, and he continues to engage with leaders at the national and international levels, helping them to think about the role of culture in school improvement.

Todd Whitaker has been fortunate to blend his passion with his profession.  He is a leading presenter in the field of education and a professor of educational leadership at Indiana State University. He has previously served as both a teacher and a principal and is the author of over 30 books, including What Great Teachers Do Differently, The 10-Minute In-Service, and Shifting the Monkey. Todd and his wife, Beth, have three children: Katherine, Madeline, and Harrison.

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