Chapter 2: Climate and Culture: Creating a Common Thread
Summary: Climate and culture are the foundation for everything we do. It determines how our relationships function, how we make decisions and solve problems as a staff, and how people feel when they enter our buildings. This chapter focuses on little changes to create a commonality between people that can positively impact a culture and climate like creating a common language, expectations, and belief system.
Additional Resources:
School Culture, School Climate: They Are Not the Same Thing
Referenced Books:
Read, Write, Lead: breakthrough strategies for schoolwide literacy success by Regie Routman
The First Days of School by Wong and Wong (now updated)
Guiding Questions:
- List and define one to two terms regularly used in your district that may not be defined for stakeholders. These could be being used in initiatives, your mission/vision, etc.
- How will you explicitly and effectively communicate these definitions to stakeholders?
- What do you see as values you desire your district to have? School? Classroom?
- What do you see as what your district/school/classroom actually valuing (how do those compare)?
- What specifically do you do (or not do) that proves those are the values?
- What values do your initiatives support?
