PD SBIP on "Why School Culture?"

As part of professional development program, both teaching and supporting staff, making a total of 37 members sat together on 30^th August 2013 in our computer laboratory to understand and learn ‘Why School Culture?’ Everybody knows what culture is. But hardly do we realize the importance of it in relation to our surrounding. The SBIP we had was solely to awaken and remind ourselves of the importance culture plays.

Culture is the shared perceptions of a group’s values, expectations and norms. It reflects the way people give priorities to goals, how they behave in different situations, and how they cope with their world and with one another. People experience their social environment through their culture. Culture is transmitted from generation to generation. (Source – EMSSD, DSE, MoE, Thimphu).

Sl #	Types of school Culture	Qualifications
1	Moving Culture	-          Boosting pupils’ progress and development, -          Working together to respond to changing context, -          Knowing where the school is heading, -          Having the will and skill towards progression and possessing norms of improving school.
2	Cruising Culture	-          Appear to be effective in the more affluent areas, -          Pupil achieve in spite of teaching quality, -           Not preparing pupil for changing world, -          And posses powerful norms that inhibit change.
3	Strolling Culture	-          Neither particularly effective nor ineffective, -          Moving at inadequate rate to cope with pace of change, -          Meandering into future to pupil’s detriment, -          Ill-defined and sometimes conflicting aims inhibit improvement.
4	Struggling Culture	-          Indicates ineffectiveness, -          The staff knows it and spends considerable energy to improve, -          Unproductive ‘thrashing about’, -          Will ultimately succeed because they have the will.
5	Sinking Culture	-          Denotes ineffectiveness, -          norms of isolation, -          Blame and loss of faith powerfully inhibit improvement, -          Staff unable to change, -          Often in deprived areas where they blame parenting or unprepared children and need dramatic action and significant support.

“School culture has been described as being similar to the air we breathe. No one notices it unless it becomes foul”. (Freiberg, 1998).

Characteristics of healthy school cultures as mentioned below were discussed at length and appreciated:

—  Marked by professional collaboration

—  Teachers and administrators share their knowledge and develop plans together to achieve organizational goals

—  Principals work with teachers – they have a shared mission and vision

—  Principals and teachers focus on student learning

—  The school is aligned…goals and objectives are consistent with the mission

Reminder -  If you do not carefully create and maintain the desired school culture, it will create itself. (Source – EMSSD, DSE, MoE, Thimphu).

As an activity, we divided ourselves into six groups and assigned each group with task to list down all positive and toxic culture prevalent in our school. The purpose of it was to demolish (if standing like fort), eradicate and not give shelter to toxic culture in our school system, if there is any.  

Since we conducted this activity after our normal class hours, time constraint as many participants were participating in Continuing Education, presentation of our lists could not be done. However, all mentors (head of departments) agreed to attach their findings to my mail address.  I will in turn compile their findings, make my comments and forward it to all school members through their mail address requesting adherence or to provide feedbacks and send it back to me. In a way, we decided to share these ideas like one having video conferencing.