The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.
—Edgar Schein
When I visited Sandi Silbernagel’s second-grade classroom in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, as part of my work on Talking About Teaching for the Teaching Channel, I saw a great example of the positive impact of culture. During one of my visits, Ms. Silbernagel and her students read Tynia Thomassie’s Feliciana Feydra LeRoux: A Cajun Tall Tale (2005), and Sandi carefully attended to minute details to create the most learner-friendly culture.
I spent two days watching Sandi teach, and it was very evident that she carefully plans each lesson to create a learner-friendly culture. For her lesson on Tynia Thomassie’s Cajun tall tale about a young girl’s adventures in the Louisiana swamp, for example, Sandi arranged stuffed alligators and crabs around the room so she could refer to them during the reading of the story. She also scanned the book to display it on her Smart Board so that all students could see it and interact with it on the big screen.
Sandi’s plans helped her create a powerful learning experience for her students. She asked the children to gather on a colored carpet for the reading of the book. As Sandi guided her students through the book, she prompted them to demonstrate on the Smart Board how they used their reading strategies (right there clues; search and check; prediction) to deepen their understanding. She also showed students a YouTube video of a swamp so they could get a vivid picture of where the heroine was going. Sandi even shared pictures of her great-grandmother, who lived in a home very much like the home of their hero. Every student was locked in as Sandi guided them through the story.
When they were done reading, Sandi played Johnette Downing’s song “Feliciana LeRoux” about the very story they had just read. Then, as a coup de grace, she gave each child a chance to eat some alligator sausage, just like the alligator in her story. Literally, the children saw, heard, touched, and even tasted what they were learning about.
Much of what Sandi did doesn’t get written down in a lesson plan, but the learning experience her students had would not have been possible if Sandi hadn’t attended to culture. Yes, the students didn’t need to see the stuffed swamp animals. Yes, Sandi could have read from the book and held up the pictures rather than pointing to the larger images on the Smart Board. Yes, she didn’t need to play the song in order to teach the reading strategies. And yes, she didn’t need to cook up alligator sausage. But years from now, even if students forget the actual words or events of the story, they will remember how they felt in the classroom created by Ms. Silbernagel, and many will remember and apply the reading strategies they learned in her class. Such is the power of a learner-friendly culture!
Culture is manifested in everything we see, hear, feel, smell, touch, and taste. Charles Hill and Gareth Jones, the authors of Strategic Management (2001), define culture as “the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stake-holders outside the organization.” Culture is the invisible force that shapes behavior in a country, an organization, or a classroom. Effective leaders (in major corporations and kindergarten classes) recognize how much culture accelerates or inhibits success or growth. For that reason, they do everything in their power to create the most successful culture.
School or classroom culture can promote or prevent student growth, development, and learning. When cultural norms promote hard work, kindness, openness, or respect, those norms can help all the members of any group be more productive, supportive, and respectful. But when norms guide group members to lower their standards—selfishness or gossip, for example—they can keep group members from coming close to realizing their potential. A destructive culture may lead us to live, as William James has said, “lives inferior to ourselves” (cited in George Sheehan, Personal Best, p. 30).
The trouble with culture is that it works indirectly and invisibly. We cannot see the forces that shape and control behavior, so as Edgar Schein writes, “we may not even be aware of it.” But everything counts in the school and the classroom. An irritating school buzzer turned up too loud has a negative effect on attitude. A loud PA system that seems to interrupt every class every day distracts students and also annoys everyone who hears it. A room filled with overflowing boxes of papers and general messiness may subtly undermine the sense of order that students feel inside. And a class in which students frequently make disrespectful comments may make students feel unsafe and unwilling to participate. Little factors, by themselves, may not make an enormous impact, but add them up, and they can make or break students’ learning experiences. When it comes to school culture, the little things are the big things.
Culture is difficult to see; yet, it is everywhere. Every interaction, every learning experience exists within a culture, and one aspect of effective instruction is creating a learner-friendly culture. I recommend five ways to shape a culture that positively influences how every student learns every day.
Norms are the invisible forces that shape behavior within a culture. In a classroom learning community, norms are different than expectations (more on this topic in Chapter 13). Expectations address each individual activity or transition; norms apply equally to every situation. Thus, treating everyone with respect is a norm, but using your whisper voice to talk quietly with a partner is an expectation that would apply only to some particular learning situations.
Teachers can shape a learner-friendly culture by proposing productive or positive norms for their learning community or involving students in creating the norms. Teachers and students can create norms on any number of topics, but common themes include (a) approach to learning, (b) respectful interactions, (c) conversation, and (d) support.
One way to involve students in co-constructing class norms is to ask them to answer the following four questions by writing down their honest answers anonymously.
After gathering the students’ responses, and prior to the next class, the teacher can review the students’ responses, summarize all of the ideas submitted, and lead a discussion about them. In some cases, students can vote (perhaps by secret ballot) until everyone (or at least a majority) agrees on the norms. The nominal group technique described in Chapter 12 is one way to structure this activity. Such a discussion can address many important questions, including What are norms and how do they work? What is a community? Can we create a community? What is respect? Why should we support each other? and What is the purpose of school?
Some teachers prefer to write their classroom norms on their own and hand them out to their students. Others prefer to use the term rules rather than norms. For me, “norms” better captures the idea of community and partnership, but if “rules” is clearer or better fits your methods, go for it.
Teachers may also wish to turn to a proven curriculum that has been developed to help teach norms. For example, Sue Vernon has created a research-validated curriculum that contains explicit guidelines for creating norms for a learning community. Her book Talking Together (2000) presents several lessons to teach students: (a) how to listen to others during classroom discussion, (b) how to work with a partner, (c) how to share ideas in class, (d) how to demonstrate respect, (e) how to respect differences between us, and (f) how to support each other.
What matters is that teachers identify and teach norms to create a positive, productive learning community. Culture can make or break students’ learning, and culture, more than anything, is the embodiment of norms.
Writing an inspirational list of community norms and then never referring to them will not create a learner-friendly culture. Thus, teachers should (a) clarify in their own minds what each norm means, (b) watch students to call attention to situations where students demonstrate respect for norms, and (c) correct students when they act in ways that are not consistent with the norms. The strategies of being a witness to the good and fluently correcting students, described below, should be employed to shape a positive learning culture.
During her lesson on the Cajun tall tale, Sandi was very attentive to her students, both when they acted consistently with classroom norms and when they violated them. I kept track of Sandi’s comments and found that in a typical minute she would say eight positive statements. Nevertheless, she also corrected students when they didn’t follow norms. Sandi intervened with students to ensure they spoke respectfully or prompted them to apologize to fellow students, if necessary. For Sandi, a critical part of culture is ensuring that students feel safe, and she does everything she can to achieve that.
Daniel Goleman, the leading expert on emotional intelligence, points to another way in which culture can be shaped. In Social Intelligence (2006), he explains that research on the brain shows that emotions are infectious. If you drive across the state with a friend who just caught an infectious fever, you may well be the one with the fever at the end of the trip. In the same way, if someone you interact with is happy or grumpy, you can end up feeling happy or grumpy. What the research suggests is that other people’s emotions almost seem to rub off on us, and leaders need to be attentive to what feelings are being spread around in their organization or classroom. Here is how Goleman states it:
When someone dumps their toxic feelings on us—explodes in anger or threats, shows disgust or contempt—they activate in us circuitry for those very same distressing emotions. Their act has potent neurological consequences: emotions are contagious. We catch strong emotions much as we do a rhinovirus—and so can come down with the emotional equivalent of a cold. …
Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Along with whatever else we are doing, we can make each other feel a little better, or even a lot better, or a little worse—or a lot worse … we can retain a mood that stays with us long after the direct encounter ends—an emotional afterglow … or afterglower. …
These tacit transactions drive what amounts to an emotional economy, the net inner gains and losses we experience with a given person, or in a given conversation, or on any given day. By evening the net balance of feeling we have exchanged largely determines what kind of day—“good” or “bad”—we feel we’ve had. (pp. 13–14)
The fact that we catch each other’s emotions has implications for how we should teach. That is, teachers need to be aware of the way they share their emotions with others. A teacher who is quick to be angry or express frustration, and who is not mindful of the impact of negative emotions, will infect students with those emotions, and those students inevitably will infect other children as well. In contrast, leaders who are quick to express warmth, happiness, and love foster positive emotions in others. Each of us shapes the emotions of those we touch. Part of teaching is recognizing that, in a very real sense, we create the emotions around us.
Teachers can do several other things to spread positive emotions. For example, they can prompt students to act in a respectful manner toward each other, such as by saying “thank you” after interacting with each other. Students can also be taught to give effective, authentic praise and encourage each other. Teachers can also use thinking prompts to shape culture. The video clips, vignettes, stories, poems, and songs teachers use all influence the learner-friendliness of a classroom. Each time a teacher chooses to use a thinking prompt, he should ask, “what kind of emotion will this introduce into our community?” If the emotion is one that is counter to productive learning, he should probably reconsider using it.
Bill Strickland, winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, and founder of the Manchester Bidwell Educational Center in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, designs beauty into the core of his school. In his Ted Talk,1 Bill makes a powerful argument for the importance of believing in our students and points out that one way we communicate our faith in our students is the way we design our students’ learning environments.
In Make the Impossible Possible (2007), he explains that when you walk into his school, you are “confronted by something beautiful every time you turn around” (p. 13). He writes about describing his center, designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, to students at Harvard:
The soaring lobby … was flooded with light from the banks of tall windows. Accents of natural wood brightened the space, and immediately arched alcoves led to the way to quiet halls. I pointed out the small touches—the rich carpets, the designer tile, the handmade stained-glass inserts in the office doors, the bouquets of fresh flowers. “This place is my idea of a perfect human shelter,” I said. It generates order and serenity and stability and optimism, things many of our students do not enjoy in abundance in their private lives. Poor people live in a world where beauty seems impossible. We make it possible. Then the world and eventually the future look very different to them. (pp. 12–13)
For Strickland, the learning environment is a critical part of the learning experience. The environment isn’t an add-on; indeed, the setting is as important as the curriculum or the activities—maybe more important.
The beauty we’ve designed into our center isn’t window dressing; it’s an essential part of our success. It nourishes the spirit, and until you reach that part of the spirit that isn’t touched by cynicism or despair, no change can begin. You can’t show a person how to build a better life if they feel no pleasure in the simple act of being alive. That’s why I built this place, and why I fill it with sunlight, and quilts, and flowers. So some black kid who thinks the world is as stale and grey as the ghetto, or some white kid from some hardscrabble blue-collar neighborhood ravaged by layoffs and chronic underemployment, can find out what an orchid smells like. (p. 17)
Bill Strickland created his own school, but what if you are a teacher with just one classroom? What can you do to create a learner-friendly environment? Sandi Silbernagel’s actions answer that question. Her classroom, like Bill Strickland’s Manchester Bidwell Center, presents students with warmth and beauty everywhere they turn.
Prior to the start of the school year, Sandi decorated her room with posters, paintings, plants, toys, colorful carpets, and comfortable couches and chairs. She also put lamps around the classroom so her students wouldn’t have to work under the glare of fluorescent lighting, and finished off her decorating with twinkle lights suspended across the ceiling. The result is a joyful, beautiful place for children to learn. “I really thought of, as a 7-year old, what would I want my classroom to look like,” Sandi told me, “and what came to mind is just ‘comfortable.’” Any teacher can create a positive learning environment by asking that simple question: What would I want if I was a student in my class?
Not every classroom needs to have twinkle lights, but every classroom should be designed to produce optimal learning. There is much teachers can do to create a learner-friendly environment, and some of them are quite simple. First, teachers can be careful to make sure the classroom is organized and tidy. A room that has boxes piled along a wall or file folders spilling over a desk suggests that a lack of order is acceptable. A lack of order in the way the room is put together might reinforce a lack of order in the way students approach their work.
As Sandi did, teachers can also do their best to make the classroom warm and friendly. Warmer lighting can create a more positive learning environment. Similarly, posters, art, or other beautiful objects can create a classroom that students enjoy being in.
One particularly powerful way to shape culture is to post quotations that promote respect, personal growth, or intellectual curiosity. A teacher I observed in North Carolina posted quotations around her room to inspire her students. When I visited her classroom, I saw sayings such as, “The limits of my language are the limits of my universe” by Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher, and “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike” by writer and poet Maya Angelou.
These are just a few strategies; what matters with culture is that teachers recognize that everything shapes culture. The norms that are created, the way norms are reinforced, the way emotion is spread, and even the way a room looks all contribute to creating a learner-friendly culture. So too do all the other strategies in this section, including the way teachers use the huge amount of power they are given when they are offered the chance to teach.
Sandi Silbernagel explains how she creates her classroom.
Video 10.1 www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
In 1995, I led an organizational learning project with the Canadian Post Office. As part of the project, I interviewed retail managers about leadership and what kinds of leaders the managers respected (and didn’t respect). The one comment I heard more than any other during those interviews was that people respected leaders “who walked the talk”—who did exactly what they expected of the people who reported to them.
Not long after I completed my work with Canada Post, Peter Senge and his colleagues published The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999), and they reported that their research with organizations led to exactly the same finding—leaders who want to shape culture and lead change must “walk the talk.” Here are a few of Senge and his co-authors’ observations:
Walking the talk isn’t just important for leaders in businesses, however. Leaders in classrooms need to walk the talk just as much as leaders in business, and if, for example, teachers expect students to treat each other with respect or be prepared, they must treat their students with respect and be prepared themselves. Indeed, because students frequently look to their teachers as models for their behavior, teachers must consciously and intentionally model the cultural norms they expect from their students.
This is simple to do, but it requires discipline on the part of the teacher. If teachers expect students to hand in papers on time, they must return papers on time. If teachers expect students to listen to them and each other, they must be experts at listening and always listen to their students.
Senge and his colleagues write that “the challenge of ‘walking the talk’ is more complex than it often appears” (1999, p. 195). This is especially true in the classroom, where the challenge and pressure of moving through the day with 32 students can inhibit a teacher’s ability to really see how she or he is acting. For that reason, we suggest teachers use strategies that help them determine how well they are “walking the talk.” Teachers, as I’ve mentioned throughout this book, can learn a great deal by video recording their classroom and watching to see how well their actions embody the norms for the class. An even easier tactic teachers can use is to audio record a lesson on a smartphone or other recorder and then listen to the recording through their car stereo on their drive home. Asking students for feedback, perhaps by having students complete a short survey, can also be enlightening.
All of us have blind spots when it comes to our own behavior. For that reason, if we truly want to shape a learner-friendly culture, we should do what we can to understand clearly how well we do, or do not, walk the talk. When it comes to shaping culture, President Kennedy’s paraphrase of Emerson is perfectly apt: “What we are speaks louder than what we say” (Senator Kennedy at the Mormon Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, September 23, 1960). We need to learn what we do, and then walk the talk.
Download a learner-friendly environment survey at www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
Use the learning environment tool (see www.corwin.com/highimpactin struction) to assess the overall environment of the school and assess the following: (a) overall order, (b) ease of access to all parts of the room and all students, (c) cleanliness, (d) aroma, (e) color and quality of paint, and (f) signs of life, including plants, art, light, quotations, and other factors.
• Culture is in large part invisible, but it has a huge impact on student learning.
• Every classroom will have a culture; the question is, will the culture be shaped by students or by the teacher?
My colleague Sue Vernon has created a number of useful, inexpensive practices teachers can use to create learner-friendly cultures. Sue’s community-building series helps students learn skills that are important for their full participation in a learning community. Talking Together teaches students how to listen, encourage others, respect diversity, and basically treat each other with kindness. Organizing Together teaches students the organizational skills they need to be productive learners. Other very helpful practices in the series include Following Instructions Together and Taking Notes Together. More information on the series may be found at http://www.edgeenterpris esinc.com.
Daniel Goleman’s work has greatly enhanced our understanding of the role emotional intelligence plays in life. His book Emotional Intelligence (2006) popularized the extremely influential concept of emotional intelligence. His book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2007) describes what occurs when people interact, and in particular, explains how emotions spread among groups. Goleman’s Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead With Emotional Intelligence (2004) is a great overview of Goleman’s ideas as they apply to leaders, including teachers.
Bill Strickland’s Make the Impossible Possible: One Man’s Crusade to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary (2007) is Bill Strickland’s story of how he grew from humble beginnings to create the impressive Manchester Bidwell Educational Center in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
1. You can see Bill Strickland’s Ted Talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/bill_strickland_makes_change
_with_a_slide_show.html.
2. You can see Sandi teaching and my interview with her at http://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/wraparound-learning-experience.