Characteristics of Positive School Culture—And How to Leverage Them

A positive school culture—one where students and teachers truly want to be—doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by design. Cultivating these environments requires that all of the individual systems and structures within a school work in concert together. In this workshop, you’ll dig into a tactical approach to school culture design—first by understanding your vision and then identifying the individual, interdependent strategies that roll up to that vision. Then you’ll develop a clear, high-level plan for systematizing each individual strategy—examining each “gear” of your culture machine and identifying concrete, actionable steps that enable those gears to turn and the larger school culture to function. You’ll also explore the challenges that can occur when schools make these kinds of transformative shifts—and how to lead through them.

School leaders are an instrumental part of school culture work, but it doesn’t mean they should do it alone. The most successful and equity-focused schools are those that are distributing the school’s strategic work—empowering teachers and staff to play a role in developing and sustaining positive school cultures. We’ll be focusing on distributed leadership for this workshop: unpacking what it is, how it works, and why it’s valuable in schools. Through a series of sample scenarios as well as a deep-dive into the context of your own school, you’ll assess the readiness and willingness of your staff to take on additional responsibility, learn to build capacity within your team, and develop a tactical plan to make distributed leadership a reality.