Hannah Calcino Boarding House Supervisor and Secondary Teacher
Why good school culture
MATTERS Culture is not easily defined, nor is it a phenomenon that is simple to understand. Culture is not a cookie cutter practice that can be picked up from one organisation and easily transferred to the next. Even anthropologists grapple with this idea and cannot universally agree on a specific definition of culture (Alvesson 2013). What they do agree on though is this: culture is an ambiguous blanket term; culture is entrenched in history and tradition; and culture is holistic, intersubjective and emotional, rather than rational and analytical (Alvesson 2013). What this means is that culture is naturally going to form, and how we intentionally react to it or mould it will influence its outcomes.
However, positive school culture is not an organic product; it takes effort to create. The process of developing a positive culture is like growing a vine. Imagine the growing frame as strategy and the water and fertiliser as culture. While we can put structures and frames in place to dictate the vine’s growth pattern, it is the water and fertiliser that helps a vine to flourish. Similarly, while an organisational strategy is important, it is the culture of an institution that influences its outcomes.
SUNATA 12
How many people do you think would influence a school culture? Deal and Patterson (1999) defined school cultures as ‘a collection of traditions and rituals that have been built up over time as teachers, students, parents, and administrators work together and deal with crises and accomplishments..’ This definition highlights the importance of various stakeholders within a school and speaks to the notion that culture is an all-encompassing, evolutionary process. School cultures are shaped and re-shaped time and time again by many people within the same context (Hongboontri & Keawkhon 2014).
The interaction between individuals and the social environment is a powerful agent in the creation of organisational behaviour (Owens & Valesky 2015). The behaviour of people, individually as well as collectively, is not simply a reflection of unique personalities but is moulded by social norms and expectations. This is where the ideology of ‘unwritten ground rules’ comes into play. Unwritten ground rules are the things within an organisation that people do, or ‘get away with’, that no one discusses (Du Plessis & Simpson 2019). Unwritten ground rules can be both positive and negative. An unwritten ground rule could be that someone buys someone else in their staffroom a coffee on their birthday, or it could be that only negative things are discussed at staff meetings. Typically, when strong affirmative culture exists, and stakeholders are largely onboard with the culture, vision and ethos, unwritten ground rules are going to be positive. If you need to identify a school’s culture, look to the unwritten ground rules and where the boundaries are being pushed. Where do people stay in their lane and within the line of instruction and where do they push the limits slightly to see how far it will stretch? Unwritten ground rules are a pivotal example of the importance of good culture over good strategy. Culture has a human dimension that strategy cannot emulate. While an institution can have pristine policies and strategies to reach success, strategy alone cannot create a successful working environment. If the culture within the organisation is not positive, the unwritten ground rules will undermine the strategy. While all stakeholders are important in the development of a positive school culture, teachers, from a collective perspective, would arguably be the stakeholders that have the most influence upon culture. While
