What if you were accidentally overlooking one of the most important things you can do for your school district?
You’re probably not, but we know that it is easy to lean so far into quantifiable metrics like test scores and graduation rates that you reach an achievement plateau that focusing on numbers alone cannot help your district push past. To do that, you need to do something far less quantifiable, which is improving your district’s school culture.
Students, teachers, and administrators alike all benefit from such improvements. Despite this, many educators and academic leaders are unclear about which strategies to adopt for their own schools. Fortunately, EVERFI has the resources you need to take school culture and academic excellence to the next level. Keep reading to discover the best ways to improve school culture in your own district!
Main Takeaways
- Improving school culture can reduce behavioral problems and improve educational outcomes.
- A successful culture improvement plan must involve buy-in from the chief stakeholders, including teachers, principals, and students.
- All stakeholders must feel like they are being heard, or your school culture improvement plan will most likely stagnate.
Table of Contents
What Is a District Admin’s Role in Developing School Culture?
As good administrators know, developing a healthy school culture requires a thoughtful strategy tailored to the demographics and needs of each school that is modeled by all and regularly assessed. Neglecting to actively build a positive school culture can lead to decreased student engagement, higher rates of absenteeism, and increased behavioral issues. This can create a challenging environment for both students and staff, ultimately impacting academic performance and overall school morale. Prioritizing school culture is essential for fostering a supportive and thriving educational community.
While teachers and students often grumble about the upper administration, it is high-level administrators who set the tone for their district by establishing rules that help improve school culture while also providing training to educators and staff to help them maintain this improved culture.
As Mary Alicia Lyons points out, new leaders also need proper training: “School systems should provide substantive and meaningful training for new administrators, including an opportunity to hear from teachers about what leadership qualities they value.” Going out of your way to solicit thoughts and opinions from teachers can help reinforce that everyone working for the district has a role to play in creating and maintaining an optimal school culture.
“School systems should provide substantive and meaningful training for new administrators, including an opportunity to hear from teachers about what leadership qualities they value.” – Mary Alicia Lyons, EducationWeek
Who Else Plays a Role?
If you’re an administrator trying to determine how to build a positive school culture, know that you’re not in this alone. In each school, the principals, teachers, and students play a powerful role in helping to change school culture for the better.
- Principals: At the individual school level, the buck usually stops with the principal, and these leaders will play the most instrumental role in incorporating your policy decisions to improve school culture. In turn, the principals know more than anyone else what their students’ unique strengths and benefits are, and you should seek their input and collaborate whenever possible to improve the culture in a meaningfully impactful and long-lasting way.
- Teachers: If principals and administrators help create policies to improve school culture, teachers are the ones who enact and maintain those policies in the classroom. Be sure to integrate specific training programs so that selected teachers can become effective leaders and brand ambassadors when it comes to making your vision for a better school culture a reality.
- Students: Ironically, it’s easy for administrators and educators to overlook the student component of school culture, but let’s face it: There is no school culture without these students. To really improve the culture, be sure to involve student leaders in your plans. Not only can they contribute some “boots on the ground” insights that teachers and staff don’t have, but their participation helps create buy-in among the student body for any change that you make.
How to Build School Culture
Now you know more about the role administrators play in shaping school culture and who your most important allies are when trying to change things up. However, that still leaves us with the biggest question of all. Specifically, we need to address how to change the culture of a school in very specific and actionable ways.
Below, you’ll find a breakdown of some great ideas gleaned from research and reports from the field. Best of all, most of these can be implemented quickly, allowing you to see results quickly. Plus, it’s always nice to move faster than the “speed of committee” when it comes to major school changes!
1. Leaders Are Meant to Be Seen AND Heard
Good administrators know that they need to regularly patrol hallways and drop into classrooms, and district administrators need to make school visitations a major part of their weekly schedule. A recent study found that 63% of teachers wanted more visibility from their leaders, and such visibility fosters better educator/administrator relationships while helping you implement your plans to change the school’s culture.
2. Encourage More Parent Involvement
If you’re wondering how to positively change school culture, one easy tip is to encourage more parental involvement. Try going beyond PTA meetings and invite students’ parents to offer direct feedback on what your school is doing. Additionally, try offering workshops where teachers and parents can have a frank dialogue about the school’s educational environment. This improves academic performance and school culture. After all, 62.1% of students report that more parental involvement boosts their self-esteem, which is a crucial component of any school culture improvement initiative.
3. Provide Teachers With More Autonomy
It can be difficult to get certain teachers on board with changing their schools’ culture when they feel like that have no say in the process. This not only leads to less buy-in but can impact teacher retention rates. By giving teachers more autonomy (perhaps by appointing a faculty senate to vote on proposed school culture changes), you can reduce how many of your own teachers are among the 90% who have felt burned out about the job. More autonomy leads to less burnout, and that means better outcomes for the entire district.
4. Emphasize Social-Emotional Learning
Emphasizing social-emotional learning (SEL) can significantly enhance school culture by fostering a supportive and inclusive environment. Developing essential skills like empathy, self-awareness, and effective communication can reduce conflicts and improve relationships among students and staff. By integrating these skills into the curriculum, schools can create a more positive, respectful, and collaborative atmosphere, ultimately leading to better academic and social outcomes for everyone involved.
With CASEL competencies embedded in our digital and offline lessons, districts are integrating EVERFI’s free character and mental health resources into their curriculum maps.
They not only produce strong learning gains but help shift student attitudes & behaviors.
For example, 26% more students reported being more confident in their ability to handle stress from relationships after completing Character Playbook.
5. Frequently Offer Praise to Students
Ultimately, students will either make or break your plans to improve the culture. You may be focused on how to change negative school culture, but that won’t matter if your biggest problem is that students never change their ways. Interestingly, one of the best ways to improve their behavior is to institute a policy where teachers must give out a certain number of highly specific compliments each week.
According to one study, middle school teachers who praised students as often as they reprimanded them improved their on-task behavior by 60-70%.
6. Emphasize Professional Development
Getting teacher buy-in is a lot easier when they feel like they not only understand the plan but have the training and resources to implement it. Create a PD session(s) that enables teachers to explore their critical role in shaping the school environment and provides them with a host of practical strategies for fostering a supportive and inclusive atmosphere.
Professional development sessions should be interactive and discussion-filled providing teachers with ample room to collaborate, personalize, and grow.
Want to expand the offerings of your next professional development day but lack the time to create it yourself?
EVERFI conducts hundreds of PD sessions each year at no cost to districts thanks to their network of sponsors. Schedule a call with your district’s dedicated EVERFI Support Team to create sessions tailored to your district’s needs.
3. Change Your Approach to Classroom Observations
A whopping 72.66% of teachers had a negative reaction to a formal observation by an administrator. Reasons vary but the pressure to perform is a leading cause of teacher resentment. You can turn this around by:
- Doing frequent & consistent observation: This provides teachers multiple opportunities to provide a more comprehensive view of their classroom dynamics.
- Providing timely feedback that focuses on the positives: Meet with teachers no later than 72 hours after the observation then highlight their strengths and successes thus building teacher confidence and encouraging the continuation of effective practices.
- Sharing supportive resources & best practices: This could include successful practices being used in other classrooms, instructional materials, and peer mentoring.
By following these and other best practices, observations can become a valuable tool for professional growth and a positive school culture.
How to Get the Process Started
The above ideas make for a great starting point when it comes to improving your district’s school culture. However, having ideas is one thing, and bringing them to life is something else altogether. How, then, can you get this process started?
Begin by conducting a SWOT analysis of your district’s current performance and take note of issues where school culture may be negatively impacting academics. For example, poor student attendance rates may exist partially because of negative school culture, and the same can be said about increasing discipline reports and student absences. Take this information and work with major stakeholders like teachers and principals to develop a multi-pronged school improvement plan designed to address these issues.
This plan should include setting classroom culture goals and providing training for teachers and staff so they can best facilitate the new plan. As mentioned before, you should also involve select student leaders for maximum buy-in among the student body. Once everyone is on the same page, you need to fully implement your improvement plan while charting progress toward your goals.
After a year (or another pre-decided interval), you must convene with all key stakeholders to determine how well your school improvement plan helped achieve your goals. Next, create a plan for the following year including specific initiatives you will continue and the new ones you wish to try. Through a collaborative effort, you can successfully create a better school culture while also improving everything from campus safety to academic achievement.
How EVERFI Can Improve Your School’s Culture
Beyond the principals, teachers, and students in your district, you have another ally when it comes to improving school culture: EVERFI.
EVERFI offers districts over 40 free life skills resources aligned to their state standards with many focused on the building blocks of a positive school culture.
On top of that, EVERFI also provides districts will free services such as:
- Professional learning
- 24/7 tech support
- Curriculum alignment
- Data analysis & more
Join the 3 out of 5 school districts working with EVERFI to strengthen their culture and students.
“To say I have been pleased with the EVERFI Team is an understatement. We are appreciative of the standards-based curriculum modules, the ease of teachers being able to assign the lessons to their students, and the aspect of them being self-graded. I look forward to continuing to work with…the EVERFI [Team].”