1

Changing
School Culture
An Introduction and Overview

T he message of this book for principals is research based and practical.

We argue that school leaders must move beyond the current pressure
to place exclusive priority on curriculum and instruction and, instead,
focus on integrating and focusing the fragmented subcultures that exist in
any school. It is the influence of peers, parents, colleagues, and community
that creates a fidgeting, rebellious student or a burned-out and cynical
teacher. Nothing inherent in a classroom creates these realities, nor can
classroom teaching alone cause them to disappear.
Intensification of leadership is our term to describe an approach to chang-
ing the cultural conditions that affect teaching and learning. We are not
advocating the abandonment of instructional leadership; principals clearly
need to understand and support what teachers do in classrooms in order
to help create the conditions that allow them to be more effective.
Intensification of leadership acknowledges the existing reality that there are
already multiple leaders in any school, and offers a road map to integrate
these influences into a more coherent and less contradictory message.
There is a fundamental problem, however: you cannot control your
school’s culture. Most of the people—teachers, students, and parents—
who collectively determine what the school’s culture is like have limited
incentive to listen to you. Managing a school’s culture is not dependent on
1
2 Building Strong School Cultures

the authority that you have based on your position, but can only be affected
by increasing your influence over behaviors, beliefs, relationships, and
other complex dynamics present in the school that are often unpredictable.
Before we begin to examine schools that have made lasting cultural
change, we offer a caveat. It is beyond the scope of this effort to assess the
issues of changes in educational policy or public attitudes that provide the
backdrop for principal’s work but over which they have little influence.
Nor do we deal with schools in crisis; those in which academic perfor-
mance and teacher morale suggest a need for a dramatic “fresh start.” The
issues we address will be those facing the vast majority of “typical
schools” and “typical school administrators.”
There is a tradition in the school reform literature that treats elementary
schools, middle schools, and high schools as if they are vastly different
places. While this is true when the discussion focuses on specific curricular
or instructional strategies, such as the efficacy of early reading programs or
AP coursework, our research (and that of others) suggests that schools have
much in common. Every principal faces similar challenges when faced with
changing the “way we have always done things here.” It doesn’t matter if
an elementary school adopts 4-block reading or a high school implements
block scheduling, school leaders will face similar forms of resistance, skep-
ticism, and challenge. The old adage that high schools teach subjects and
elementary schools teach children is countered by the finding that grade and
other teams exert influences in elementary schools that can be every bit as
powerful as those of departments at the secondary level.
To illustrate our approach, throughout the book we will consider cases
drawn from real schools and principals who have done things right—or were
blindsided by unanticipated events and consequences of their own actions.
The authors of this book are researchers who have collectively spent more
than fifty years trying to understand the world of teachers, administrators,
and students. To understand these worlds, and to seek solutions to problems
of practice, we have grounded our approach in organizational and manage-
ment theories that were not specifically written for education. We have also
been in the classroom and have worked directly with many schools and edu-
cational professionals, so we have the capacity to pull what is relevant from
this broader and more abstract base. We hope that a novice school leader will
find our analysis and recommendations useful to guide beginning efforts to
take a more active role in shaping school cultures. We also expect that expert,
experienced school leaders will read this book and find it affirming as they
see themselves in our vignettes and recommendations.
This chapter will introduce the key assumptions, concepts, and topics
that serve as the basis for the remainder of the book. How we perceive
the nature of school culture is central to developing an intensification of
leadership to change that culture. Just as physicists sometimes conceptu-
alize light as a wave and sometimes as a particle, we will describe school
cultures as both stable and fluid. We will introduce the acronym PCOLT to
describe three key conditions for creating constructive school cultures:
professional community, organizational learning, and trust. At the end of
 Changing School Culture 3

the chapter, we will discuss the allure of the “quick fix” and explain why
culture change requires moving beyond a fixation with short-term
improvement, whether in achievement scores or in attendance at back-to-
school night for parents.

SCHOOL CULTURES: STABLE AND

FLUID OR STABLE AND FRAGILE

During the twentieth century, principals were held responsible for orga-
nizing schools to ensure that curriculum and instruction were effectively
supervised and that the “core business” of school organization was pro-
tected from disruption. A primary role of principals was to keep teachers
buffered from the distractions of the external community. By focusing
attention on what occurred inside the school, it was reasoned that school
principals could manage the day-to-day events of the school in a manner
that optimized student learning.
However, recent research has begun to shift attention away from the
maintenance tasks of school management to focus on school leaders’
responsibility for creating cultures that are innovative and adaptable. Our
own work on professional community, which was initially developed in the
early to mid-1990s, exemplifies both the increasing emphasis on continuous
improvement as well as the need for principals to build and solidify more
dynamic relationships among educational professionals. In other words, we
affirmed the primacy of leadership in shaping the culture within the school.
By looking at culture through the lens of Edgar Schein, in which
culture has three layers—artifacts, espoused values, and fundamental
assumptions—we propose a framework of leadership and management
that is particularly conducive to effecting change (Schein, 2004).
A school’s culture is characterized by deeply rooted traditions, values,
and beliefs, some of which are common across schools and some of which
are unique and embedded in a particular school’s history and location.
Culture informs the ways in which “things get done around here” and, just
as important, frames how change efforts are perceived. Based in accumu-
lated experiences, a school’s rules and regulations, polices and procedures,
whether written or informal, are the lasting artifacts of old organizational
lessons. Here’s an example:

ISOLATION AT CORSON MIDDLE SCHOOL

Several years ago, as part of a shift to a middle-school structure, Shirley Preston, the prin-
cipal of Corson Junior High School, was asked by the district curriculum director to create
interdisciplinary teaching teams for all fifth- through eighth-grade students. Prior to the
(Continued)
4 Building Strong School Cultures

(Continued)
new district policy, departments had significant influence over teaching and, by all mea-
sures, they functioned well. Department members met regularly to discuss curriculum
and instruction as well as to troubleshoot observed difficulties in learning. Trust was high
both within and among departments, and members enjoyed strong professional and per-
sonal relationships. The district predicted that the shift to interdisciplinary teams would
go smoothly since so many foundational teaming behaviors were in place. From the
start, however, the shift to interdisciplinary teams went poorly. Teachers resented their
lack of involvement in the original middle-school decision as well as the changes
required of them. Old relationships suffered and new ones were slow to form. Rather
than the communal focused meetings that were the norm under the old department
structure, interdisciplinary team planning time quickly evolved from conflict-
riddled gatherings into brief perfunctory conferences. Teachers began to close their doors
to each other and individualism became normative as trust eroded. Years later, the cul-
ture at Corson Middle School still suffers from this transition. Innovation is isolated and
rare, and the middle-school ideal of teaming is virtually nonexistent.

Conversely, we have been in many schools where trust is high, com-

munication effective, openness is encouraged, and dissent and conflict are
viewed as opportunities for creative problem solving. The culture is a pos-
itive force for reform. In these schools, students and teachers can be seen
engaging in practices that encourage learning. These kinds of practices are
examples of Schein’s “artifacts” of culture and exemplify the ways in
which culture can be stable and positive. These artifacts are covered in
more detail in Chapter 3, where we present a framework of leadership and
management behaviors that are particularly conducive to effecting change.
Yet stability, even in a positive culture, is not enough to foster lasting
improvement in school organizations. Consider the case of Corson Junior
High, where the decision to move to a middle-school model was based on
a thoughtful consideration of the research on early adolescent develop-
ment and learning. The principal might have expected some reluctance to
change, but she also expected the positive artifacts of the old stable struc-
ture to emerge intact in a radically new educational structure. The greater
the structural change, the more likely tacit assumptions will surface in
unanticipated ways. It is when change occurs in an organization that the
change agent finds out if the culture was stable and fluid—or stable and
fragile. As schools seek to develop cultures that are both stable and fluid,
they must search for ways to both surface that which they believe is impor-
tant and allow for new futures to be imagined.
Corson’s principal was surprised that the positive, stable culture at her
junior high school became fragile when confronted with fundamental
change. If she had worked with the staff to give them opportunities to
 Changing School Culture 5

make the new structure their own (and perhaps integrate some of the
expertise that existed in the departments), could the interdisciplinary
teams have struggled to find a new way of working? If the district cur-
riculum coordinator had encouraged teachers to take responsibility for
designing a school program that provided students with an interdiscipli-
nary and personalized experience, but allowed time for within-subject cur-
riculum development, could the transition have been managed by the staff
themselves? Would providing opportunities in which tacit assumptions
and values were surfaced and explored have helped to provide a bridge
between what was culturally valued in the old structure and a dream for
the new one? Culture is too complex to follow a static blueprint for change.
What seems stable may shift as the social equations the actors have taken
for granted are altered. Culture always will be the creation of its partici-
pants in response to each other and outside stimuli. For a culture to remain
adaptive and fluid, the participants must have a hand in creating the new
structures that grow out of the old. We hope that our book will provide
you with the understanding and tools needed to develop strategies for
addressing similar issues in your school.
One function of culture is to provide meaning and self-esteem, but a
positive school culture does this as it improves organizational perfor-
mance. This requires the principal to balance several foci. If the stakehold-
ers in a school cannot take ownership of a change process, then self-esteem
will be preserved by some form of blame on “the idiots that did this to
us”—thereby absolving themselves of responsibility.
Figure 1.1 suggests that leadership in schools must balance an empha-
sis on creating stability and change, and between tending to the internal
functioning of the school and paying attention to relationships with stake-
holders outside.
We know that the typical principal will look at this figure and groan
that it’s just too much. Research suggests that this sense of overload is
based on the real explosion of expectations and tasks for school adminis-
trators (Cooley & Shen, 2003; DiPaola & Tschannen-Moran, 2003). We
agree with the typical principal: the leadership job that we have observed
in today’s schools is ever larger and ever more complicated, and no one
person or administrative team can do it all. But rather than dividing up the
existing leadership pie among more people, we suggest that the size of the
pie also needs to be increased to include new tasks that are just beginning
to emerge.
An up-to-date principal will have been inundated with popular and
professional literature that emphasizes the need to set priorities and focus
on instructional leadership. This usually means challenging teachers to
improve curriculum and instruction, spending more time in classrooms,
and mining data to provide evidence of how well the school is achieving
its student-learning goals. Also, they also have to spend their time work-
ing on goals that are more clearly connected with more general school
6 Building Strong School Cultures

Figure 1.1 Organizational Culture and Leadership

Emphasis on Cohesiveness and Stability

External Focus
Internal Focus

Intensified
Leadership

Emphasis on Adaptation and Flexibility

climate, meeting state requirements, discipline, and organization (Whitaker

& Turner, 2000). Studies of how effective principals operate when there is
a high demand for change suggest that effective leaders enact six functions
(Heller & Firestone, 1995):

1. Providing and selling a vision

2. Providing encouragement and recognition
3. Obtaining resources
4. Adapting standard operating procedures
5. Monitoring the improvement effort
6. Handling disturbances

A quick perusal of these functions suggest that some involve maintenance

(for example, providing encouragement or handling disturbances), while
others emphasize change (selling a vision and adapting school procedures).
Changing a school’s culture to balance stability and change is not an
easy task. A principal’s ability to shift from the traditional internal priori-
ties of curriculum, instruction, and maintaining a smooth and orderly
environment is limited both by time constraints and the expectations of
teachers. Current leadership literature suggests that there are solutions, such
 Changing School Culture 7

as establishing teacher professional learning communities and encouraging

peer consultation and coaching, that can augment the principal’s instruc-
tional role, but, without a great deal of attention to roadblocks and details,
can easily be perceived as another temporary innovation that will pass (Hord
& Sommers, 2008) or even what Andy Hargreaves calls “contrived collegiality”
that is manipulated by administrators for their own purposes (Hargreaves &
Dawe, 1990). Changing a school’s internal culture demands that designated
school leaders have real partners within the professional staff and that
teachers want and exercise influence in areas outside the classroom.
In addition, resilient school improvement is more likely to occur if the
principal focuses not just inside the school but also on redefining the rela-
tionship between school professionals and their communities. Evidence is
increasing that effective school leaders are engaged with their local context
and make student learning a task that can be supported by many. Principals
occupy a singular position that permits them to act as boundary-spanners,
creating solid links between the school (the primary site of formal student
learning) and the community (the primary site of informal student learn-
ing). Creating bonds with other educators outside the school, through prin-
cipal networks and more collaborative relationships with district office
staff, can serve as a significant source of stimulation and reflective admin-
istrative practice. (We address these issues in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.)
Our perspective is broader than just increasing parental involvement or
creating linkages with community service agencies, and we reject the dom-
inant belief that interactions with the community should be driven by a
public-relations focus that emphasizes successes, downplays failures, and
limits transparency. Based on research, which we review in Chapter 7, we
argue that the school’s interpretive frame should shift away from looking
at the community as a resource to support teachers and classrooms toward
seeing it as a locus for student learning and development. In fact, we argue
that deep-seated changes in the culture of schools are unlikely to occur
without action to create more fundamental bonds with the community.
Creating community bonds and building trust with immediate stake-
holders is no longer enough to ensure sustained support for a particular
school and public education in general. Principals are increasingly expected
to be entrepreneurial and to develop new alliances that can help schools
meet their goals for student learning and development. Images of schools
as full-service providers of health and social service care are plentiful in the
school reform literature, and principals are looking for partners in business
communities and other agencies to develop new programs ranging from
on-site preschools to networks of service learning and internship opportu-
nities. Never before have schools felt such pressure to support healthy
youth development—at the same time that they are mandated to raise test
scores. Most surveys do not measure the attention that principals give to
this part of the job, and those that have indicate that principals still give this
part of the job limited priority (Goldring & Hausman, 2001), but our infor-
mal observations suggest that this demand is increasing. This represents a
8 Building Strong School Cultures

dramatic shift in school culture because it changes the dynamic from one
that is focused on students in classrooms to one that emphasizes the con-
nections of the school with the wider world of foundations, business
groups, social service providers, and government agencies.

INTRODUCING PCOLT—PROFESSIONAL
COMMUNITY, ORGANIZATIONAL
LEARNING, AND TRUST
School administrators are not anthropologists; they are concerned with
school cultures as a means to positive outcomes. This book focuses on the
cultural attributes of schools that create better opportunities for the
students who attend. Thus, improving culture is not an end in itself, but
the means by which school leaders can address the goals of student
progress and achievement. Three features of school cultures that have been
tied to student learning in multiple studies are:

1. Professional community. Professional community (PC) directs a

spotlight on the relationships among adults within the school. By focusing
on the structural and human resource conditions necessary for schools to
become strongly connected around the goal of student learning, the frame-
work suggests that strong school cultures are based on shared norms and
values, reflective dialogue, public practice, and collaboration (Louis &
Kruse, 1995). The essence of professional community is that all adults in a
school are presented with the opportunity to work with others to grow and
change—and that meaningful and sustained connections are necessary for
that to occur. This occurs when teachers take collective responsibility for
improving student learning. Collective responsibility, in which all members
feel accountable for all students, is at the core of intensified leadership.
2. Organizational learning. The concept of organizational learning
(OL) suggests that continuous improvement through collective engage-
ment with new ideas will generate enhanced classroom practices and
deeper understanding of how organizational improvement occurs. The
idea is frequently coupled with that of professional community in pro-
grams that are designed to create more visible “professional learning com-
munities” (Hord & Sommers, 2008; Stoll & Louis, 2007). However, not all
group learning occurs in organized meetings, and we wish to emphasize
the uncertainty of predicting which structures and experiences will pro-
duce the “aha moment” that helps to shift the culture from old to new
values, beliefs, and practices. Seemingly random contacts with novel ideas,
as well as structured efforts to examine data and plan new programs, may
produce forward momentum. OL focuses on the ways in which new ideas
are brought into the school organization, how they are considered and eval-
uated, and the ways in which school organizations retain and use the
 Changing School Culture 9

knowledge generated from them. Organizational learning generally occurs

when groups acknowledge small failures and consider alternatives, and
this occurs more often when more people take responsibility for problem
finding and problem solving (Levitt & March, 1988).
3. Trust. Trust is the glue that holds social networks and relationships
together. In schools, trust is considered to be the result of several disposi-
tions working in concert. Among these are integrity (or honesty and open-
ness), concern (also called benevolence or personal regard for others),
competence, and reliability (or consistency). Trust is also low in schools that
feel beleaguered by public pronouncements that they are failing—not a mes-
sage that is designed to create positive collaboration. Trust has been linked
with organizational effectiveness in business settings; in schools, trust
among teachers and between teachers and other groups is linked to higher
student achievement (Tschannen-Moran, 2004). While principals cannot
bear full responsibility for creating trusting cultures in their schools, their
behavior sets a tone and a foundation for creating trusting relationships and
professional community in other groups (Bryk & Schneider, 2002).

These ideas are increasingly familiar to school leaders and teachers,

and many programs and staff development opportunities are designed to
increase principal’s ability to work with them. However the assumptions
underlying PCOLT stand in stark contrast to the deeply embedded under-
standing of many school professionals about how schools should operate.
Dan Lortie observed that teachers generally assume that they will work
alone rather than with other adults, that the difference between their work
and administrator’s work constitutes a bright line that is seldom crossed
(Lortie, 2002). Thus, there is a chasm between professional aspirations for
dynamic and caring cultures and the reality encountered by many princi-
pals when they arrive at the schoolhouse door each morning.
Our research suggests that while many schools are working hard to
develop school cultures characterized by professional community, organi-
zational learning, and trust (which we refer to as PCOLT), there is a great
deal of variation in the degree to which they have shifted their values away
from older mental models. Cultivating these values can be a juggling act,
and, as shown in the Corson example, a solid, positive culture can quickly
erode when confronted with change. Our argument is that principals and
other school leaders can guide their schools toward this goal and, once the
school is moving in the right direction, help to sustain the momentum.
PCOLT is most powerful when the ideas that underscore each of the
themes are viewed as strategic actions to build strong adaptive school
cultures. Furthermore, our thinking positions PCOLT as an enduring
approach to leadership behavior and temperament. Building a strong
school culture is not something you do once, nor is PCOLT something you
can claim to become—it is an orientation toward school leadership that
sets the stage for achieving your goals for student success.
10 Building Strong School Cultures

INTENSIFIED LEADERSHIP: AN INTRODUCTION

Employing PCOLT strategies requires a different kind of school leader-
ship. We choose to call this form of leadership intensified because it
increases the number of people engaged in leadership roles and the scope
of the school’s work as it relates to student outcomes. Other words been
used to capture the changing nature of leadership in contemporary set-
tings, ranging from shared leadership and site-based management, to
servant and distributed leadership. Intensified leadership builds on the
insights of these models.
Shared leadership and site-based management in most forms are lim-
ited to involving a variety of stakeholders in making decisions (Bauch &
Goldring, 1998; Leithwood & Duke, 1998). Servant leadership, as a critical
concept, emphasizes the role that formal leaders play in supporting the
goals and work of others (Block, 1993). Mayrowetz and his colleagues dis-
tinguish between two ways of thinking about the distribution of leader-
ship in a school. One describes how influence operates in schools—who has
it and under what circumstances (Gronn, 2000; Spillane, Halverson, &
Diamond, 2001), while the other prescribes sharing leadership as a means
of reallocating the work of school improvement (Mayrowetz, Murphy,
Louis, & Smylie, 2007).
In our view, the term intensified leadership combines both the descrip-
tive and prescriptive perspective, and it unavoidably includes elements of
shared and servant leadership. It assumes that there is deliberately broadened
meaningful involvement—through job redesign and through the permanent
redistribution of the work. It goes beyond saying that people will see their
work as encompassing more tasks. By deepening their collective responsi-
bility for finding and solving problems, selecting tasks and foci, people
become more accountable for meshing the larger goals and vision of the
school with the smaller tasks of daily leadership and management. Thus,
it goes beyond simply giving the school’s work to more people, and
demands that all members of the school community become active deci-
sion makers. The implication is that there is no longer a single leader, or
even a small leadership team. Intensified leadership suggests that leader-
ship roles must meaningfully and purposefully be inhabited by the many.
What this means in practice will become apparent as we present cases of
leadership intensification through the remainder of the book.
Our notion of intensified leadership challenges the seductive image of
the heroic leader. Traditionally, a hero or heroine “leads” by making criti-
cal decisions concerning organizational vision and goals, and sets a clear
path for their attainment. Heroic leaders are portrayed as knowing the
right thing to do and exactly when to do it. By making decisive choices and
providing directions for others to accomplish these goals, heroic leaders
motivate others to achieve success. This traditional representation of lead-
ership positions the heroic leader as more intelligent, charismatic, and
 Changing School Culture 11

insightful than other members of the organization and holds the leader
ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the organization. While
the scholarly literature has trumpeted the demise of heroic leadership for
several decades, the popular press continues to demand it and replace-
ment terms such as “transformational leadership” (Bass, 1998) and “super-
leadership” (Manz & Sims, 2001) do little to dispel the largely patriarchal
image.
The problem with viewing leadership in this way is simple—it can’t
work in today’s schools. The issues schools face are too complex, the pres-
sures of day-to-day operations too complicated, and the stakes too high to
suggest that an all-knowing leader—or even an all-knowing superleader-
ship team—can succeed. Furthermore, this conception belies the truth of
how school organizations work. From the office assistant who chooses to
spend time with a parent new to the district, to the classroom teacher who
chooses homework assignments, important decisions are made at all levels
of the organization on a daily, even hourly, basis. In reality, leaders who
attempt to lead heroically reduce the effectiveness of their followers, over-
burden themselves, and impair the organization’s ability to respond adap-
tively to issues that may arise.
In contrast, intensifying leadership suggests that rather than focusing
energy in one location or person, leadership is enhanced by the interaction
and networking of many organizational members. By expanding the con-
ception of who leads to include teachers, parents, and the wider commu-
nity, schools have the potential to better meet the challenges they face.
Intensifying leadership highlights the notion that leadership can be
viewed as the intellectual and social outcomes of a group of interacting
individuals. One prominent researcher likens this kind of leadership to a
network of influence in which formal positions are less important than the
belief by others that each person makes a difference (Spillane, Halverson,
& Diamond, 2001). Another proponent of this perspective argues that the
need for intensification demands a different “architecture” for school orga-
nizations that abandons the image of vertical authority (Gronn, 2000).
Rooted in communal action, intensified leadership suggests that when
organizational members work in concert with each other they can pool
their individual knowledge and expertise, resulting in better outcomes.
Furthermore, intensified leadership is more than empowerment of indi-
viduals to complete specific tasks. The empowerment literature empha-
sizes the transfer of existing decision-making functions from school
leaders to teachers through new special roles or structures in which
teachers can exercise influence (Marks & Louis, 1997). While it is argued
that sharing decision-making responsibility within the school will aug-
ment traditional leader influence, the size of the leadership pie usually
remains the same. Intensified leadership opens the boundaries of leadership
to include, in ongoing and permanent ways, a wide variety of members of
the school and the surrounding community in new decision-making roles,
12 Building Strong School Cultures

and it asks them to become involved in generating new kinds of decisions

and practices rather than simply carrying out existing functions. Jobs and
roles are enlarged, and the range and type of decisions that can be made at
all levels and by a variety of parties is increased. In this way, intensified
leadership acknowledges that expertise is distributed across the school organi-
zation and beyond.

INTENSIFICATION AND BEYOND QUICK FIXES

We are familiar with the ways in which leaders can be seduced by the
notion of a “quick fix” because we ourselves have held administrative
positions (although not as principals). Opportunities to hear the latest
expert abound; leadership and management texts offer appealing new
insights and concepts. Methods for collecting and analyzing data roll out
of state departments of education with alarming regularity. Technology is
touted as the answer to the variety of instructional and leadership woes
plaguing schools today. Furthermore, the pressure to raise test scores by
the next test seems almost unbearable.
We sympathize with superintendents who ask for professional learning
communities to be implemented in all buildings within the next month and
arrange for a one-day workshop to ready the district. We understand why
school principals use one-hour faculty meetings or single-day retreats to
brainstorm about developing strategic plans designed to improve student
achievement. We empathize with teachers who report that they intend to
implement the new instructional practices but are observed to be lacking
core skills to do so. We understand why schools hope that a good curricu-
lum map inevitably will show the way to changes in classroom practice.
A good friend of ours refers to the smorgasbord of choices available to
school leaders and teachers as “random acts of staff development” while
another views both staff development and new policies as the “spray and
pray” approach to school improvement. When people are frustrated and
worried, they often look kindly at almost any idea that seems to have
potential—or they may reject all ideas as “something we’ve tried before.”
When people feel discouraged and distracted, they hope that the additive
quality of their efforts will create results. More often, the accumulated
mountain of initiatives only leads to innovation fatigue.
However, we argue that, like the old adage, “if it seems too good to be
true, it is,” most new programs and staff development products won’t take
school leaders to the places they wish to go. Lasting change in school cul-
ture takes time, but without those changes, efforts to improve student
learning are likely to be temporary. Real change in culture also requires
more than time; it takes sustained effort focused on clearly understood and
commonly shared goals and values. Embracing quick fixes fosters a belief
in leaders that they are doing the best they can for the students in their
schools. Instead, they often weaken the school culture’s ability to engage
 Changing School Culture 13

in real change by nurturing pipe dreams. We shall explore briefly some of

these false hopes.
1. Cultural change can occur quickly with new, enthusiastic leader-
ship. As we have discussed, organizational cultures are deeply embedded
in the practices and policies of the school. Though all members of a school
organization might agree that change is needed, new and unproven poli-
cies and practices will be viewed skeptically. Even when cultures are
viewed as negative, people would much rather “stay with what they
know” than change. The insecurity of the unknown always makes the
known a better bet. For these reasons, initiating cultural change is a slow,
adaptive process.
2. Culture change can be stimulated from the outside through new
policies. Inasmuch as culture is rooted in internal beliefs and values, it is
resistant to external influence. Simply put, internal change may be stimu-
lated from the outside, but it must be nurtured internally. State and even
district policies lack the leverage and credibility to create the conditions of
community, learning, and trust needed to foster real cultural change. This
helps to account, of course, for the tangible variability in school cultures
that often occur within any but the smallest districts. We are not arguing
that districts and states have no influence on schools—there is plenty of
evidence to indicate that they affect both practices and basic assumptions.
However, more than policy or leadership change is needed for districts to
have an impact on a school’s culture (see Chapter 6).
3. Teachers and administrators should make the decisions—school
culture should be dominated by professional values. An aspect we argue
in more detail in Chapter 7 suggests that unless we engage the external
school community in matters of school reform and innovation, schools
cannot enjoy the broad support needed to be successful, nor are they fully
capitalizing on their available resources. While schools may temporarily
be able to insulate themselves from community pressures, they rely on
establishing trusting relationships on an immediate practical level (voting
for school funding). It is the longer-term impacts that are most important for
this book: Schools that have trusting relationships with parents show greater
student achievement gains according to a number of scholars (Bryk &
Schneider, 2002). Developing shared values with the community, even
when members of the community are of different races and have lower
educational levels, is essential to creating supportive learning environ-
ments in the home and community.
4. More teamwork will create better school cultures. Clearly, team-
work matters. A hallmark of strong culture is communal activity toward
shared goals. However, to mistake efforts to create teamwork for activities
related to classroom teaching and learning activity is foolhardy. Teams can
help to focus on the work creating improved outcomes for students, but
they may also become competitive and distract teachers’ attention from
14 Building Strong School Cultures

schoolwide goals and practices. Teams, like other school structures, need
to be integrated into a network of relationships that may be less cohesive,
but support a broader school improvement culture.
5. Changing the school’s mission and vision is the key to changing
behavior and beliefs. Missions can be motivating and introduce a new
vocabulary and ideas to stimulate talk. Their impact on culture is often,
however, limited to providing superficial understandings of complex ideas.
When we adopt slogans about practice rather than real changes in practice,
little changes. People’s behavior and beliefs change when they engage in
sustained learning that challenges their assumptions and provides better
avenues to achieve results. As Peter Gronn pointed out some time ago, talk-
ing is at the center of this kind of administrative work. Leadership is exer-
cised largely through informal communications rather than through
significant decisions (Gronn, 1983). The centrality of sustained communica-
tion is emphasized by Schneider and Hollenczer (2006) as a critical tool in
managing the simultaneous need for stability and fluidity, and managing
the boundaries between external and internal pressures.

SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

Culture change requires sustained effort, over a period of years, that is
broadly distributed throughout a school and that centers on the combination
of values and behaviors that allow teachers and administrators to make
good choices during the very busy workdays that they always encounter. It
requires spontaneous leadership actions as well as long-term strategic
choices (more on this idea in Chapter 2); it requires the ability to address
both the big picture and short-term demands simultaneously (more on this
idea in Chapter 3). When schools attend to those aspects of their internal cul-
tures that impede their ability to create community, learn together, and
engender trust in each other, improvements in the outcomes for students are
evident. But principals cannot do this alone or only in concert with the
teachers in their building. The connections between leadership and culture
change are further explored in Chapter 4. Principals also need colleagues
and a professional network in which they can become reflective learners
(more in Chapter 5); they need to be more strategic and effective in working
with their district offices (Chapter 6), and in developing true partnerships
with their parent and community stakeholders (Chapter 7). In Chapter 8 we
return to our theme, and discuss how the themes and examples from the
individual chapters are related to the work of school principals.

RECOMMENDED READINGS
Because this book is about leadership and change, we strongly recommend
that you browse some of the following, which are among our favorites
 Changing School Culture 15

dealing with this topic. These books were selected because they contain
durable ideas that will, especially if they are considered together, push
almost anyone’s ideas about change management beyond their current
boundaries. In addition, they are all good reads and, though based in
research, reflect an understanding of the problems of practice.

Bennis, W. (2000). Managing the dream: Reflections on leadership and change.

New York: Perseus.
Every leader needs to be familiar with Warren Bennis, whose contributions to
understanding modern organizations are without parallel. He is a former univer-
sity president as well as a decades-long advisor to CEOs, and this book is a col-
lection of some of his previously published writing on change.

Fullan, M. (1993). Change forces: Probing the depths of educational reform. New
York: Falmer.
Michael Fullan is the foremost synthesizer of research on educational change.
This book, which is the first (and we think still the best) of his series on change forces,
outlines what we know about managing change in school settings. The second book,
Change Forces: A Sequel, and the third, Change Forces With a Vengeance,
elaborate on the ideas presented in this early book, and are also worth looking at. This
book is, however, the most practical, and if you haven’t read it, you should!

Hall, G., & Hord, S. (1987). Change in schools: Facilitating the process. Albany,
NY: SUNY Press.
The authors of this book provide a useful theory of how individual change
occurs during an organizational change effort. Their first perspective, Levels of
Use, emphasizes the importance of gauging school-level change by understanding
individual levels of familiarity and competence in taking on new behavior. The
second perspective, Stages of Concern, looks at the emotional aspects of change.
The models have been developed as both research and monitoring tools over many
years, and are used throughout the world.

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

John Kotter’s book is one of the most popular among managers in the private
sector. While not all business management texts are relevant to school adminis-
trators, this book provides an excellent overview of basic principles that we think
are particularly relevant for principals. His discussion of how to generate “short-
term wins” is an important antidote to long-term strategic plans that often weigh
heavily on a tired change master.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2002). The leadership challenge. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
This is a good companion book to Kotter’s because we consider them the best
of the popular general management books that emphasize the role of leadership in
16 Building Strong School Cultures

change. Clearly there are differences between business and school settings, but
both of these books provide pointed summaries of what is known about strategic
approaches to change. We particularly like Kotter’s emphasis on how to provide a
compelling vision for change and how to encourage people in the organization to
come on board. Kouzes and Posner use their deep experience to succinctly outline
the challenges of leadership, summarizing the qualities that help guide the per-
sonal traits that leaders must draw upon, and the way in which these qualities
need to be expressed in order to motivate and encourage others. Both books focus
on practices that can easily be adapted to educational settings.

Louis, K. S., & Miles, M. B. (1990). Improving the urban high school: What
works and why. New York: Teachers College Press.
This is the only one of our recommended books that uses a lot of data—but it
nevertheless develops a practical approach to managing the beginning stages of
change when there are few resources, some hostile circumstances, and a sense of
cynicism and fatigue among faculty members. While it is fifteen years old, the case
studies of five high schools are not particularly dated.

Sarason, S. (1996). Revisiting “The culture of the school and the problem of
change.” New York: Teachers College Press.
This is a revision of Seymour Sarason’s classic work on what needs to
change in schools if student experiences and learning are to improve. Rather
than looking at the quick fixes, Sarason concentrates on the basic features of
school culture that make real change difficult. While this is not a quick read,
it is essential for change masters who want to develop their own checklist of
what needs to be altered in a school before significant change can occur. This
is one of the few classic writings on change that pays a lot of attention to
student experiences.

Schmoker, M. (1999). Results: The key to continuous school improvement.

Arlington, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development.
This is the text for school leaders who want to understand what data-driven
decision making can actually do for their schools. Mike Schmoker provides practi-
cal examples of what needs to happen before the school can become a real learning
organization. His focus on using data positively is a welcome antidote to the sense
that data are largely used to punish schools, teachers, and students.

Weick, K., & Sutcliffe, K. (2001). Managing the unexpected: Assuring high per-
formance in an age of complexity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
An invaluable tool for principals who are trying to create real change in class-
room practices and student experiences, while at the same time working effectively
within a results-based accountability environment. The emphasis on continuous
improvement is a refreshing alternative to change management books that empha-
size only transformation and “big, new thinking.”
 Changing School Culture 17

ANALYZING YOUR SCHOOL

Identifying Internal and External Foci
Consider the external and internal foci present in many schools. Identify how often each
plays a role in your school. Then identify if this is work you are currently doing as an
individual or as part of a leadership team. Circle those areas in which you might consider
intensifying your leadership.

Internal Foci

Daily Weekly Monthly Individual Team

Student behavior and discipline

Curriculum adoption and implementation

Managing relationships with parents

Managing faculty and staff relationships

Budget and budget planning

School improvement and change agendas

Vision and mission setting

Accountability and testing

Scheduling and building operations

Supervision and coaching

Planning for professional development

External Foci

Community contacts and relationships

focused on issues or events within
the school

District office meetings

Participation in district office initiatives

Networking with other professionals

Countywide or regional meetings

Working with community groups on

non–school-related issues

Working with social workers or

community health professionals

Copyright © 2009 by Corwin Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Building Strong School Cultures: A Guide
to Leading Change, by Sharon D. Kruse and Karen Seashore Louis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, www
.corwinpress.com. Reproduction authorized only for the local school site or nonprofit organization that has
purchased this book.