School Culture and School Improvement

School culture refers to the way teachers and other staff members work together
and the set of beliefs, values, and assumptions they share. A positive school climate
and school culture promote students' ability to learn. School climate refers to the
school's effects on students, including teaching practices; diversity; and the
relationships among administrators, teachers, parents, and students.
School improvement is the process by which schools become more effective both
in terms of academic outcomes as well as in developing the social and cultural
wellbeing of the children and adults within the school. It describes conscious efforts to
raise school achievements by modifying classroom practices and adapting
management arrangements to improve teaching and learning.

Model of School Improvement

Inside school
In-school changes address the enabling framework and the school environment where
teaching and learning take place. Becoming ‘better’ involves:

● creating and maintaining an ethos of expectation and sense of purpose;

● exercising leadership;
● promoting teacher quality; and
● ensuring effective management.
Outside school
The supporting environment includes the quality of relations with parents and the
community. It also includes the level of support provided by education management
institutions and systems at national and sub-national levels, in terms of funding, data
management, and administrative and pedagogical support.
The idea of developing the “whole school” and its environment of support networks is a
familiar theme that informs most school improvement initiatives. UNICEF has
encapsulated this in the Child Friendly Schools model.

Reflections on school improvement

Because school improvement is resource-intensive, requiring clarity of purpose and
coordinated effort, it is often subject to diminishing returns. Despite this, few
governments around the world would exclude school improvement in their list of policy
objectives. What then, is the solution to improving schools? When considering, in
practical terms, what will make schools better geared to children’s learning and
development, three areas stand out:

● More inspired school management. Schools need competent managers, but they also
need leaders who can energize pupils, teachers and the community by creating a
purposeful ethos and a shared set of values.
● Higher standards of teacher professionalism. The interaction of teachers and
students is key to determining the efficacy of learning. Structured lesson plans or highly
prescriptive teachers’ guides can only be temporary fixes, in the absence of additional,
long-term support to help teachers master effective pedagogies on their own.
● Higher expectations from schools, backed by supportive supervision and better
inspection. Setting standards at a national level, making better use of regional and local
school supervisors and developing an inspectorate capable of driving up school
performance are often underdeveloped aspects of school improvement programmes.

The points above would provide a basis for a programme of school improvement.
However, it is not only about what is done, but also how it is done. The following figure
aims to demonstrate how school improvement involves movement on several fronts
simultaneously.

Change at the school level must be supported by system-level reforms, which would
include setting, communicating and supporting a national set of standards that focus on
children’s learning and development. These can provide concrete examples of inspired
school management and teacher professionalism. They can also guide quality
assurance and support.
Additionally, public accountability is important to encourage responsive changes
within government. As part of this, school standards can engage parents and the
community to contribute to improvements: clear indicators on learning outcomes and
the learning environment can be shared with parents, guardians and communities so
that they can hold their schools to account and provide local pressure for bigger
change.
Given the complexity of school improvement, the lack of instant solutions and the
absence of clear political leadership, pressure for change has to come through public
opinion. Shoring up public opinion is not easy for development agencies. The prize for
donor-assisted school improvement would come by successfully igniting public concern,
while at the same time, co-opting governments to ride the wave of public support by
actively engaging in reform. This would mean committing to both internal and external
funding to support integrated approaches, intelligently aimed at transforming schools.
Stephen Baines is an education adviser with extensive experience in
educational development at national, regional, and local levels in a wide range of
countries. He has been concerned with issues of school quality and the conditions and
incentives
necessary to improve teachers, schools, and education management.
Definition of School Culture
School culture According to Fullan (2007) school culture can be defined as the
guiding beliefs and values evident in the way a school operates. ‘School culture’ can be
used to encompass all the attitudes, expected behaviors and values that impact how the
school operates.
National Culture Hofstede considers (national) culture as ‘The collective
programming of the human mind’ ‘The behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a
particular social, ethnic or age group’ Dictionary.com

What is the importance of ‘school culture’?

Research strongly buttresses the central role of culture to school success All of
these studies and others … point to the multiple ways school culture fosters
improvement, collaborative decision making, professional development and staff and
STUDENT learning.
Understanding national cultures and educational values
Collaboration depends on good communication and shared values.
• National cultures can have different styles of communication, and different
understandings of what good education looks like and what it should achieve.
• Once these differences are understood, they can be dealt with, and the
collaboration required to develop professional learning communities can be more
easily/possibly achieved Intercultural communication.
Different values related to education: (cultural dimensions)
Cultural Dimensions affect teachers’ expectations of what happens in the
classroom, how they should and can behave, how the students should and can behave,
how they behave in meetings, how they communicate with colleagues, their line
managers and eventually their boss.

Low Individualism Versus High Individualism

Types of School Culture and teaching cultures
School cultures are unique and distinctive. They are created and re-created by
people considered members of a context; i.e., teachers, students, parents, and
communities, among many others. Deal and Peterson (1999) defined that 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”. School cultures are influential. They shape and re-shape what
people do, think, and feel (Beaudoin & Taylor, 2004; Cooper, 1988; Craig, 2009; Deal &
Peterson, 1999, 2009; Guise, 2009; Hongboontri, 2003; Hongboontri & Chaokongjakra,
2011; Jurasaite-Harbinson & Rex, 2010; Kleinsasser, 1993, 2013; Lieberman, 1988,
1990; Maslowski, 2001; McLaughlin, 1993; Muhammad, 2009; Rosenholtz, 1991; Sato
& Kleinsasser, 2004; Schien, 2010). Rosenholtz’s (1991) quantitative and qualitative
study of elementary school teachers in America convincingly demonstrated how school
cultures molded these teachers. With data gathered from 1,213 completed
questionnaires and 74 interviews, Rosenholtz identified two types of school cultures;
i.e., nonroutine/certain and routine/uncertain. In the nonroutine/certain environment,
teachers worked collaboratively, were involved in goal setting, and had opportunities for
professional development. These, in turn, maximized students’ academic growth. In
contrast, teachers in the routine/uncertain environment worked in isolation, had little (or
almost no) involvement in school goal setting, and had fewer opportunities for
professional development. Students’ performances were, as a consequence, minimized.
The influences of school cultures on teachers have also been extensively covered in the
field of foreign language (FL) education. Kleinsasser’s (1993) findings of his triangulated
study with 37 FL teachers in five school districts in America emphasized the power of
school cultures. Similar to Rosenholtz (1991), Kleinsasser found two types of school
cultures: non routine/certain and routine/uncertain. The nonroutine/certain culture
promoted, Kleinsasser explained further, collaboration within a community. In other
words, his participating FL teachers collaborated not only with their colleagues in the FL
department but they also worked with teachers from other subject disciplines, students,
parents, administrators, and communities. Through collaboration, these FL teachers
could create a successful learning environment where their students had the opportunity
to use the second language for communication.
Typology of School
School typology is a classification based on community and school
characteristics. School typology is the factor of paramount interest. In Ohio, for
example, schools are classified into nine typologies that were created to account for
common demographic characteristics including population density, school size,
geographic locale, and community income levels.
School–community relationships can serve many goals ranging from enhancing
student achievement to community development. This article examines the relationship
between school–community partnerships and community development in light of a state
prekindergarten policy that requires partnering. To understand the local responses, we
propose a typology using a continuum of partnering, from isolation to committed partner,
and a continuum of community health, from declining to growth. Using mixed-method
analysis, we apply this typology to the Universal Prekindergarten policy in New York
State. The relationship among these measures illustrates the potential role of state
education policy to positively or negatively affect the health of a community.
In archaeology, a typology is the result of the classification of things according
to their physical characteristics. The products of the classification, i.e. the classes, are
also called types. Most archaeological typologies organize portable artifacts into types,
but typologies of larger structures, including buildings, field monuments, fortifications or
roads, are equally possible. A typology helps to manage a large mass of archaeological
data. According to Doran and Hodson, "this superficially straightforward task has proved
one of the most time consuming and contentious aspects of archaeological research".
Typology is based on a view of the world familiar
from Plato's metaphysics called essentialism. Essentialism is the idea that the world is
divided into real, discontinuous and immutable "kinds". This idea is the basis for most
typological constructions particularly of stone artefacts where essential forms are often
thought of as "mental templates" or combinations of traits that are favoured by the
maker. Variation in artifact form and attributes is seen as a consequence of the
imperfect realization of the template and is usually attributed to differences in raw
material properties or individuals' technical competences.
 The four different types include the “band,” “tribe,” “chiefdom,” or “state.”
Morphological typology – Created by Friedrich von Schlegel and August von Schlegel,
this methodology through which language is classified based on the combination style
of morphemes within the language.
 Types of Typology

● Morphological/descriptive typology.
● Chronological typology.
● Functional typology.
● Stylistic typology.
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world
(see linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their
common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how
those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very
little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey
meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two
categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily
on discrete particles (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) for inflection, while fusional
languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to
contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further
subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which
take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including nouns, as
one word.
Analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages can all be found in many regions
of the world. However, each category is dominant in some families and regions and
essentially nonexistent in others. Analytic languages encompass
the Sino-Tibetan family, including Chinese, many languages in Southeast Asia, the
Pacific, and West Africa, and a few of the Germanic languages. Fusional languages
encompass most of the Indo-European family—for example, French, Russian,
and Hindi—as well as the Semitic family and a few members of the Uralic family. Most
of the world's languages, however, are agglutinative, including
the Turkic, Japonic, Dravidian, and Bantu languages and most families in the Americas,
Australia, the Caucasus, and non-Slavic Russia. Constructed languages take a variety
of morphological alignments.

Chronological typology
This type consists of sequential ordering of archaeological artifacts merely based on
form. It involves collecting dates or relative dates that establishes the position in time
the artifact lies in to reflect the civilization/events of a current
region. A chronological typology is made up of diagnostic artifacts, or relics that
suggests a particular event/people occurred during a period of time.

Functional typology
Artifacts organized into this kind of typology are sorted by the use they serve rather than
the looks they have or the chronological sequence they possess. In some cases, the
artifacts may not be removed because of the functional purpose they exhibit, and the
restoration of the pieces can be more difficult than other types of objects.

Stylistic typology
This type of classification displays information about the artifact via the object's display.
Stylistic typology is not to be confused with classification of certain styles, for that would
just entail organizing artifacts based on how they look. This type of typology accounts
for information told through the artifact. Pottery is an example of a stylistic typology
because the artifacts provide information on artistic evolution.

Educational Change
Education is generally thought to promote social, economic, and cultural
transformation during times of fundamental national and global changes. Indeed,
educational change has become a common theme in many education systems and in
plans for the development of schools. According to Seymour Sarason, the history of
educational reform is replete with failure and disappointment in respect to achieving
intended goals and implementing new ideas. Since the 1960s, however, thinking about
educational change has undergone several phases of development. In the early
twenty-first century much more is known about change strategies that typically lead to
successful educationalreforms.

The heart of successful educational change is learning, both at the individual

and at the community levels. See also: EDUCATION REFORM; ScHOOL-BASED
Decision-MAKING; SCHOOL REFORM.
Phases of Educational Change

The first phase of educational changes was in the 1960s when educational
reforms in most Western countries were based on externally mandated largescale
changes that focused on renewing curricula and instruction. The second phase, in the
1970s, was a period of increasing dissatisfaction of the public and government officials
with public education and the performance of schools, decreasing financing of change
initiatives, and shrinking attention to fundamental reforms. Consequently, in the 1980s
the third phase shifted toward granting decision-making power to, and emphasizing the
accountability of, local school systems and schools. Educational change gradually
became an issue to be managed equally by school authorities and by the local
community, including school principals and teachers. The fourth phase started in the
1990s when it became evident that accountability and self-management, in and of
themselves, were insufficient to make successful changes in education.
Furthermore, educational change began to place more emphasis on
organizational learning, systemic reforms, and large-scale change initiatives rather than
restructuring isolated fields of education. In brief, educators' understanding of
educational change has developed from linear approaches to nonlinear systems
approaches that emphasize the complexity of reform processes, according to Shlomo
Sharan and his colleagues. Similarly, the focus of change has shifted from restructuring
single components of educational systems towards transforming the organizational
cultures that prevail in given schools or school systems, as well as towards transforming
large sections of a given school or system rather than distinct components of schooling.

Emerging Theories of Educational Change

In the early twenty-first century it is generally acknowledged that significant
educational change cannot be achieved by a linear "recipe-like" process. The
consensus among theorists and practitioners is growing that traditional models of
thinking about educational change no longer provide sufficient conceptual tools for
responding to multidimensional needs and politically contested environments. The
major challenge of educational change is how to understand and cope with rapid
change in an unpredictably turbulent world. Emerging new theories of educational
change are beginning to employ concepts and ideas derived from the sciences of chaos
and complexity. The main characteristics of these new theories are nonlinearity of
processes, thinking about education as an open system, the interdependency of the
various components of the system, and the influence of context on the change process
itself.
Although educational change occurs everywhere, it is still not discussed
systematically or analyzed by researchers and educators worldwide. Particularly in
countries undergoing political and economic transition, educational change remains a
political agenda rather than a well-designed engine of social reform. The heart of
successful educational change is learning, both at the individual and at the community
levels.

References:
 Read more: Educational Change - Phases of Educational Change, Emerging
Theories of Educational Change - School, Reform, Systems, and Reforms -
StateUniversity.com https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1933/Educational-Chan
ge.html#ixzz6swap1nQ8
FULLAN, MICHAEL. 1998. "The Meaning of Educational Change." In The International
Handbook of Educational Change, ed. Andy Hargreaves, Michael Fullan, Ann Lieberman, and
David Hopkins. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

FULLAN, MICHAEL. 2000. "The Return of Large-Scale Reform." Journal of Educational

Change 1:5–28.

HARGREAVES, ANDY, ed. 1997. Rethinking Educational Change with Heart and
Mind. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

HARGREAVES, ANDY. 2000. "Representing Educational Change." Journal of Educational

Change 1:1–3.

SARASON, SEYMOUR B. 1990. The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform: Can We

Change Course Before It's Too Late? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

SHARAN, SHLOMO, et al. 1999. The Innovative School: Organization and

Instruction. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.