Culture and Climate Action Plan
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RoutineRitualandSchoolCommunity_Edutopia.htmlRoutine, Ritual, and School Community
Build a positive school culture and climate for students and staff alike by creating expectations around constructive routines and fun rituals.
By Greg Schnagl November 19, 2015 close modal"Building a strong sense of community in schools is both important and doable," says Eric Schaps. And as Thomas Sergiovanni writes in Building Community in Schools, "In communities, we become connected for reason of commitment rather than compliance" (p.58). Sergiovanni believes the connectedness is motivated by our essential human need "for a sense of belonging, of being connected to others."
OK, great. So how do we, as educational leaders, get that buy-in, that commitment to create a strong sense of community within our district, school, or classroom? This post will illustrate the connection between culture, climate, and community, and will provide examples of ways that school and classroom leaders have built a sense of community through the use of routines.
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Subscribe now End of newsletter promotion.Culture + Climate = Personality + Attitude
Steve Gruenert describes culture as an organization's personality and climate as its attitude (PDF). Those who would follow the current leadership cannot choose the culture of the school they enter. Yet they still seek to be part of it. Columnist Barbara McKee wrote, "Belonging to a community is a choice." If new followers hope to belong to your school, they will need to understand the way things are done, the culture and the manner in which they are completed, and the climate. One way for a leader to help transmit the values and norms of a school is by embedding them into routines.
In their book School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It, Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker describe routines as the things that leaders do to help the school run efficiently, with rituals being the "stylized expressions of our values and beliefs." When informed by the mission of the school or classroom, over time routines become the norm. Routines become rituals that followers come to expect.
The following video from Edutopia demonstrates community building in action through the use of a morning meeting routine. Leaders speak of the benefits to student learning, improved attendance, and fostering a sense of community:
