10:06am: Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval

National expert shares insight on school culture with W.Va. principals

DANIELS, W.Va. — More than 100 school principals gathered at the Glade Springs Resort and Conference Center on Monday for the beginning of a two-day discussion of the role and impact of group culture and group tendencies among educators and administrators.

Dr. Stephen Gruenert, co-author of the book “School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It,” presented members of the West Virginia School Leadership Network for Experienced Principals with the findings of his research into what he described as a self-contained culture that tends to develop within school environments, including traditions and expectations that can influence day-to-day functions in ways that may undermine educational goals.

“I’m just fascinated by why people do the things they do and what kind of factors influence their behaviors, especially professionals, because this is something that we would find in athletic teams, churches, fire departments, hospitals,” Gruener told MetroNews. “You always have your groups of people who come together and create their own unwritten rules of how we do things around here. And, if a leader is aware of that, it makes it a little bit easier to negotiate.”

Gruenert said the development of an unhealthy culture among teachers often is an incremental, subtle process that develops over several years or decades.

“One of the examples I tend to use is the idea that teachers are supposed to turn in lesson plans, all the time, and you’ll have some teachers who say, ‘Well, I just don’t have time to do that,’ or some teachers might say, ‘My lesson plans change all the time.’ And so, you’re always going to have a few negative people who push back on any kind of idea, whether it’s good or bad,” he explained.

“The negative people will recruit each other. They’ll look for other people who don’t want to do lesson plans, either. And in doing so, they can create a small group and begin to leverage other teachers, as this group begins to expand. Eventually, their loyalty to each other will outweigh their loyalty to the school. So, once they come together as a group and they have bonded tightly, they might use the excuse, ‘I don’t have time,’ for whatever the principal asks them to do. And because they have this social unit, there’s some strength in that.”

According to Gruenert, charter schools are not always the laboratories of innovation proponents of such institutions often make them out to be, in terms of addressing cultural factors that may be undermining a particular school’s mission or its educational outcomes.

“30, 40 years ago, we called them lab schools. We called them schools where people were allowed to innovate and experiment, and we could see what works and what didn’t work, but since they’ve become for-profit, for the most sake, you might have some people out there who don’t really get learning to the degree to which they need to understand it. It becomes more of a business. But, a charter school done right can really provide us with a lot of good research,” he said.

Gruenert, a former middle school and high school principal, chairs the Educational Leadership Department at Indiana State University and was a founding member of the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute. He received a Ph.D. in Educational Governance and Supervision from the University of Missouri in 1998.

Among the topics to be discussed during the conference are the West Virginia Standards for Effective Schools, data-driven decision making, strategies to best impact student learning, and tips for hiring, training, and retaining teachers who will actively work to improve a school’s culture.

The forum is being hosted by the West Virginia Department of Education’s School Leadership Network.





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