School Level

Here’s a counterintuitive idea in our present age of toxic disagreement: the best school cultures are riddled with arguments.  To be clear: culture-enriching arguments aren’t the same things as the radioactive Twitter ranting, name-calling, outrage-mongering, or Facebook flame-warring that we’re exposed to these days. No. Those kinds of things kill culture; like cesspools, they breed […]

If we want to improve the cultures of our schools, we’d be smart to look not just at the way we lead, but also the way we meet. Whether meeting one-on-one or as a whole district, informally or formally, as a PLC or as a grade-level team, meetings create culture. Today, I want to look […]

When school cultures get toxic, everyone suffers: kids, staffs, communities. Long-term flourishing falls from view, obscured by angst and turmoil and distraction. One method for improving school cultures is to develop Dan Coyle’s three essential skills of great cultures: psychological safety, mutual vulnerability, and shared purpose. (See this blog post, or see Coyle’s book The Culture Code.) These […]

When school cultures get toxic, everyone suffers: kids, staffs, communities. Long-term flourishing falls from view, obscured by angst and turmoil and distraction. One method for improving school cultures is to develop Dan Coyle’s three essential skills of great cultures: psychological safety, mutual vulnerability, and shared purpose. (See this blog post, or see Coyle’s book The Culture Code.) These […]

Lately, my professional reading keeps bumping into the themes of school culture and leadership. At first, it can seem like school culture is far removed from the work of classroom teachers like me. After all, I don’t lead PLC or staff meetings, and I’m not giving speeches or writing emails to the district. I also […]