Transforming The Culture Of Schools

Busy administrators will appreciate this quick read packed with immediate, accessible strategies. This book provides the framework for understanding dynamic relationships within a school culture and ensuring a positive environment that supports the changes necessary to improve learning for all students. The author explores many aspects of human behavior, social conditions, and history to reveal best practices for building healthy school cultures.

This book speaks directly to issues of equity and school transformation, and shows how one indigenous minority teachers' group engaged in a process of transforming schooling in their community. Documented in one small locale far-removed from mainstream America, the personal narratives by Yupík Eskimo teachers address the very heart of school reform. The teachers' struggles portray the first in a series of steps through which a group of Yupík teachers and university colleagues began a slow process of reconciling cultural differences and conflict between the culture of the school and the culture of the community. The story told in this book goes well beyond documenting individual narratives, by providing examples and insights for others who are involved in creating culturally responsive education that fundamentally changes the role and relationship of teachers and community to schooling.

Where are we now? Where are we going? : preparing our students for an uncertain future / Patricia A. Jennings, Anthony A. DeMauro, and Polina P. Mischenko -- A selective review of mindfulness training programs for children and adolescents in school settings / Rebecca N. Baelen, Michael V. Esposito, and Brian M. Galla -- Turn and listen : strengthening compassion and leadership in the adult community in schools / Pamela Seigle, Chip Wood, and Lisa Sankowski -- Modeling mindfulness : principal leadership and development for personal and organizational growth / Eleanor Drago-Severson and Jessica Blum-DeStefano -- Embodied teacher mindfulness in the classroom : the calm, clear, kind framework / Cynthia Taylor, Patricia A. Jennings, Alexis Harris, Deborah L. Schussler, and Robert W. Roeser -- Cultivating passion for practicing and teaching mindfulness : a multiple-case study of compassionate school project teachers / Polina P. Mischenko and Patricia A. Jennings -- The school counselor : change agent and collaborator for holistic student well-being / Rebecca L. Tadlock-Marlo and Meghan Damler -- Creating mindful and compassionate schools : including parents as partners / J. Douglas Coatsworth, Melissa Ward George, and Aimee Kleisner Walker -- Finding peace in chaos : mindfully prepared public school teachers / Richard C. Brown and Elizabeth Grassi -- Being in school transformation : toward equity and social justice / Velma L. Cobb.

How can a school become a place where all members of the staff are learning, growing, and working to increase student achievement? The answer lies in systems thinking and a focus on continuous improvement, two concepts that can transform staff development from something that people merely tolerate to something that they actively pursue to create lasting improvements in teaching and learning. Each chapter of Transforming Schools: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement is grounded in a set of operating principles that provide practical guidance to school leaders. The story of a fictional school brings the ideas to life as the characters—a school principal, teachers, and district-level administrators—experience the shifts in thinking that are necessary to transform a school into a competent system. Through their story, the reader gains a clear understanding of the six steps of continuous improvement: Identify core beliefs. Create a shared vision. Use data to determine gaps between the current reality and the shared vision. Identify the innovations that will most likely close the gaps. Develop and implement an action plan. Endorse collective accountability. Thoughtful analysis of the fictional dialogue throughout the book gives readers an understanding of the dynamic nature of change, systems thinking, and continuous improvement. And questions at the end of each chapter help readers apply key concepts to their own schools. Whether your school improvement goals are clearly defined or still in development, Transforming Schools will help you tackle the many challenges of the change process.

This book sets out a three-stage programme for lesson observation showing how a collaborative whole-school approach can transform the culture of the staffroom and improve outcomes for pupils. Focusing on the emotional environment of the classroom, the relationships between teachers and pupils, and teaching and learning outcomes, it will enable schools to provide a consistent approach to lesson observation where good practice can be celebrated and shared. Revealing the positive impact of the programme on pupils’ engagement and exam results, co-operation between departments and teacher wellbeing, the book: Provides clear guidance on implementing the programme and adapting it for different contexts. Shows how data can be used for both Ofsted and Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) inspection documentation. Adresses key issues such as culture, staff psychological contracts, the emotional environment of the school and leadership development. If you are looking to make real impact within your school and bring about change for the better, the three-stage lesson observation programme is the tool for you. This innovative approach brings consistency, parity and fairness to lesson observation creating a secure and safe environment in which pupils can learn and teachers can teach.

This book is designed to help educators recognize and, if necessary, change a school's culture. It guides principals, other administrators, and teachers in the process of shaping the culture of their schools. For those who have already begun the process, the book provides insights, examples, and reassurance that their efforts are headed in the right direction. Chapter 1 provides a framework to help leaders understand the terms "culture" and "climate." Chapter 2 establishes the importance of culture by reviewing some of the research evidence, which shows that school culture influences student and teacher motivation, school improvement, leadership effectiveness, and academic achievement. The third chapter examines three levels of organizational culture outlined by Edgar H. Schein (1984)--tangible artifacts, values and beliefs, and underlying assumptions. Chapter 4 describes several instruments and qualitative procedures that a leader can use to identify and measure school culture at each of Schein's three levels. The next three chapters offer three perspectives on the process of transforming a school's culture--the systems approach, vision building, and the leader's role as learner, motivator, and modeler. Practical suggestions for culture-building are also given. (Contains 72 references.) (LMI)

In working to build a sense of nationhood, Ghana has focused on many social engineering projects, the most meaningful and fascinating of which has been the state's effort to create a national culture through its schools. As Cati Coe reveals in Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, this effort has created an unusual paradox: while Ghana encourages its educators to teach about local cultural traditions, those traditions are transformed as they are taught in school classrooms. The state version of culture now taught by educators has become objectified and nationalized—vastly different from local traditions. Coe identifies the state's limitations in teaching cultural knowledge and discusses how Ghanaians negotiate the tensions raised by the competing visions of modernity that nationalism and Christianity have created. She reveals how cultural curricula affect authority relations in local social organizations—between teachers and students, between Christians and national elite, and between children and elders—and raises several questions about educational processes, state-society relations, the production of knowledge, and the making of Ghana's citizenry.

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinkingis valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothingless than environments that bring out the best in people, takelearning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propelboth the individual and the group forward into a lifetime oflearning. This is something all teachers want and all studentsdeserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We MustMaster to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author ofMaking Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture ofthinking is more important to learning than any particularcurriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplishthis by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time,modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, andenvironment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout thisbook, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is notabout just adhering to a particular set of practices or a generalexpectation that people should be involved in thinking. A cultureof thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that canpropel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can behard and challenging mental work.