What is the Culture at Our School?

It's Winter Break. It's pretty quiet around the school with a few workers on campus to catch up on maintenance or end-of-the-year responsibilities. I usually spend a couple of days during school breaks to clean my office and to trash things I no longer need, but this time, I did a pretty good job of keeping my office relatively free of clutter. (That's an accomplishment for me!) I've been having a difficult time writing a new post for this blog. It's not that I've not been reflecting; on the contrary, I've probably been reflecting more-than-usual as I near the end of my career as an educator and a principal at our school.

George Couros to the rescue! His latest blog post, "People Shape Culture" was exactly what I was thinking about, and when George's first line stated,  "I am struggling with an idea here, so I have decided to blog it out . . Let's see where it goes." It was as if he was reading my mind.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the culture of our school. I reflect on the first few years of my tenure here, and I realize how much I've grown as a leader. Yet my basic beliefs about teaching and learning haven't changed much. I still believe that we need to focus on our students and what they need to be successful. The culture of a military-impacted school is different from a local community school where students might attend with the same classmates from K-12. There are different challenges at our school, challenges that we've addressed through supports as well as our curriculum and instruction. ("Proud to Be a Principal at a Military-Impacted School") 

I was lucky to work under school leaders who trusted me and gave me the green light to try new strategies or lessons to engage my students. I believe this is why I, as a principal, work to build relationships with our staff so they are comfortable to be innovative in their classrooms to meet the needs of their students. Many of the ideas and changes we have implemented were suggested by teachers: co-teaching, Response to Intervention, project-based learning, Google Apps for Education (G-Suite), student-led conferences, integration of technology for teaching and learning, our Exploratoria, afternoon enrichment classes, and more.

I reflected on our staff, and I realized that 90% have been hired or were transferred to our school after I became principal fifteen years ago. This is probably why our school culture is one that is aligned with my personal beliefs about education. We hired the right people for our culture and put them in the right seats on the bus.

When I leave the school, I expect that the culture will change. If it's true that people shape culture, then what we've implemented based on our beliefs will remain, but the new leader will bring in his/her ideas to positively influence the culture. And that is how it should be!