Culture in School Learning

Culture in School Learning
Author: Etta R. Hollins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2008-04-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135638632

In this text Etta Hollins presents a powerful process for developing a teaching perspective that embraces the centrality of culture in school learning. The six-part process covers objectifying culture, personalizing culture, inquiring about students' cultures and communities, applying knowledge about culture to teaching, formulating theory or a conceptual framework linking culture and school learning, and transforming professional practice to better meet the needs of students from different cultural and experiential backgrounds. All aspects of the process are interrelated and interdependent. Two basic procedures are employed in this process: constructing an operational definition of culture that reveals its deep meaning in cognition and learning, and applying the reflective-interpretive-inquiry (RIQ) approach to making linkages between students' cultural and experiential backgrounds and classroom instruction. Discussion within chapters is not intended to provide complete and final answers to the questions posed, but rather to generate discussion, critical thinking, and further investigation. Pedagogical Features Focus Questions at the beginning of each chapter assist the reader in identifying complex issues to be examined. Chapter Summaries provide a quick review of the main topics presented. Suggested Learning Experiences have been selected for their value in expanding preservice teachers' understanding of specific questions and issues raised in the chapter. Critical Readings lists extend the text to treat important issues in greater depth. New in the Second Edition New emphasis is placed on the power of social ideology in framing teachers’ thinking and school practices. The relationship of core values and other important social values common in the United States to school practices is explicitly discussed. Discussion of racism includes an explanation of the relationship between institutionalized racism and personal beliefs and actions. Approaches to understanding and evaluating curriculum have been expanded to include different genres and dimensions of multicultural education. A framework for understanding cultural diversity in the classroom is presented. New emphasis is placed on participating in a community of practice. This book is primarily designed for preservice teachers in courses on multicultural education, social foundations of education, principles of education, and introduction to teaching. Inservice teachers and graduate students will find it equally useful.

School Culture Rewired

School Culture Rewired
Author: Steve Gruenert
Publisher: ASCD
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2015-01-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1416619909

Your school is a lot more than a center of student learning--it also represents a self-contained culture, with traditions and expectations that reflect its unique mission and demographics. In this groundbreaking book, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer tools, strategies, and advice for defining, assessing, and ultimately transforming your school's culture into one that is positive, forward-looking, and actively working to enrich students’ lives. Drawing from decades of research on organizational cultures and school leadership, the authors provide everything you need to optimize both the culture and climate of your school, including * "Culture-busting" strategies to help teachers adopt positive attitudes, outlooks, and behaviors; * A framework for pinpointing the type of culture you have, the type that you want, and the actions you need to take to bridge the two; * Tips for hiring, training, and retaining teachers who will actively work to improve your school's culture; and * Instructions on how to create and implement a successful School Culture Rewiring Team. Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school's culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, prosperous or struggling, School Culture Rewired is the ultimate guide to making sure that the culture in your school is guided first and foremost by what's best for your students.

Creating Cultures of Thinking

Creating Cultures of Thinking
Author: Ron Ritchhart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2015-02-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 111897462X

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.

Shaping School Culture

Shaping School Culture
Author: Terrence E. Deal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2016-08-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1119210194

The most trusted guide to school culture, updated with current challenges and new solutions Shaping School Culture is the classic guide to exceptional school leadership, featuring concrete guidance on influencing the subtle symbolic features of schools that provide meaning, belief, and faith. Written by renowned experts in the area of school culture, this book tackles the increasing challenges facing public schools and provides clear, candid suggestions for more effective symbolic leadership. This new third edition has been revised to reflect the reality of schools today, including the increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, federal reforms such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state sponsored improvement programs, and other major issues that impact organizational culture and the role of school leaders. Each chapter features new examples and cases that illustrate persistent problems, spelling out key cultural implications and offering concrete examples of overcoming the challenges while maintaining a meaningful learning environment. The chapter on toxic schools continues to provide the field's most trusted advice on navigating this rocky terrain, and the discussion's focus on how to manage negativity remains especially integral to besieged school administrators across the U.S. Recent years have jolted the nation's school system with a number of new developments that spell problems for the cultural tapestry of schools. This book provides expert perspective and sage, doable advice for administrators tending to external pressures while sustainingor evolvinga more positive school culture. Navigate new challenges including Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and waning confidence and faith Turn around a toxic school culture with confidence and success Foster a culture of passion, purpose, and meaning Adopt a more active form of symbolic leadership to support students, faculty, staff, parents, and community Test scores as the primary metric, relentless reforms, waning public support, and timid initiatives wrapped in bureaucratic packaging: while among the most prominent issues administrators face are only the tip of the iceberg. Shaping School Culture charts a route through competing pressures to help educational leaders hew a positive learning environment for schools.

Culture Re-Boot

Culture Re-Boot
Author: Leslie S. Kaplan
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-01-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1452277958

Your start-up menu for super-charged culture change There′s an invisible thread woven through your school that defines everything from dress codes to student success. It′s your school culture, and reshaping it will yield highly visible improvements for teachers and students. Leslie Kaplan and William Owings guide you in improving leadership, teaching, learning, confidence, and trust throughout your school. Culture Re-Boot reframes school culture to include organizational learning, relational trust, accountability, program improvement, and teacher effectiveness while showing you how to: • Be the transformational leader your school needs to reinvigorate your school culture • Establish a student-centered learning culture focused on student outcomes • Engage teachers in culture-focused leadership teams that support teacher and student learning • Get parents and community on-board to collaborate for student achievement • Connect professional development and school culture for maximum results Packed with hands-on culture re-boot activities to help school leaders and faculty revitalize their school′s values and practices, this practical handbook for school improvement will energize your school′s culture and build the capacity to help all students succeed. "Ever since Seymour Sarason wrote his seminal book on The Culture of Schools and the Problem of Change, we have known that ′culture′ is at the heart of all organizational performance. But reformers keep forgetting this key fact. Kaplan and Owings′ book changes all that. Now in one place you can find everything you need to know to ′re-boot′ you own school′s culture." —Michael Fullan, Author of Motion Leadership "As a principal focused on student achievement and school climate, I am excited to begin using these strategies and discussions to drive our conversations to a deeper and more meaningful level. The combination of school culture, professional learning community, and teacher/community leadership provides a compelling and unique exploration of real methods to sustain student achievement and school improvement." —William Richard Hall, Jr., Principal R. C. Longan Elementary School, Henrico, VA

School Culture Recharged

School Culture Recharged
Author: Steve Gruenert
Publisher: ASCD
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2017-02-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1416623450

Why do some schools succeed while others struggle? Why do policies and programs often fail to deliver what they promise? In this follow-up to their insightful School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It, authors Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer practical advice and strategies that help you build positive energy to reinvigorate your school’s culture and staff. Written as a standalone guide, School Culture Recharged clarifies the difference between culture and climate and zeroes in on key school improvement efforts, including * Moving from the culture you have to the culture you want; * Using the school’s culture to improve teaching, job satisfaction, and morale; * Maximizing the intentions of professional learning communities; and * Developing organizational habits--rules and rituals--that can contribute to positive change. For education leaders at all levels, this book delivers a compelling message: Understanding and harnessing the transformative power of school culture can propel your school into the kind of place where teachers want to work, administrators can focus on what matters most, and students can thrive.

School Culture Rewired

School Culture Rewired
Author: Steve Gruenert
Publisher: ASCD
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2015-01-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1416619933

Note: A newer edition of this title is available. Your school is a lot more than a center of student learning—it also represents a self-contained culture, with traditions and expectations that reflect its unique mission and demographics. In this groundbreaking book, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer tools, strategies, and advice for defining, assessing, and ultimately transforming your school's culture into one that is positive, forward-looking, and actively working to enrich students’ lives. Drawing from decades of research on organizational cultures and school leadership, the authors provide everything you need to optimize both the culture and climate of your school, including "Culture-busting" strategies to help teachers adopt positive attitudes, outlooks, and behaviors; A framework for pinpointing the type of culture you have, the type that you want, and the actions you need to take to bridge the two; Tips for hiring, training, and retaining teachers who will actively work to improve your school's culture; and Instructions on how to create and implement a successful School Culture Rewiring Team. Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school's culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, prosperous or struggling, School Culture Rewired is the ultimate guide to making sure that the culture in your school is guided first and foremost by what's best for your students.

Teaching and Learning Culture

Teaching and Learning Culture
Author: Mads Jakob Kirkebæk
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462094403

This book is based on educational research conducted by researchers from the Department of Learning and Philosophy and the Confucius Institute for Innovation and Learning at Aalborg University. Empirically, it reports on different approaches to teaching and learning of culture, including a student-centered task-based problem-based learning (PBL) approach, a digital technology-supported approach and more. It also reports on how, when teaching and learning culture, teachers’ professional identity and the informal teaching and learning environment impact the teaching and learning of culture in different educational settings from primary school to university. A central theme in the book is the power of context. The studies illustrate in multiple ways, and from different angles, that “culture is not taught in a vacuum or learned in isolation”, but may be influenced by many factors both inside and outside the classroom; at the same time, culture also influences the context of the learning. The context may be “invisible” and hide itself as tacit knowledge or embedded values, or it may be very visible and present itself as a fixed curriculum or an established tradition. No matter what forms and shapes the context takes, the studies in this book strongly indicate that it is essential to be aware of the power of context in teaching and learning culture in order to understand it and negotiate it. This book suggests that teachers should not try to limit or avoid contextual influences, but instead, should explore how the context may be integrated into and used constructively in the teaching and learning of culture. This allowance of context in the classroom will allow for teachers, students, subjects and contexts to enter into a dialogue and negotiation of meaning that will enrich each other and achieve the established goal – acquisition of cultural awareness and intercultural understanding.

Language, Culture, and Teaching

Language, Culture, and Teaching
Author: Sonia Nieto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1315465671

Distinguished multiculturalist Sonia Nieto speaks directly to current and future teachers in this thoughtful integration of a selection of her key writings with creative pedagogical features. Offering information, insights, and motivation to teach students of diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, examples are included throughout to illustrate real-life dilemmas about diversity that teachers face in their own classrooms; ideas about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and ways to engage with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry. Designed for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional development courses, each chapter includes critical questions, classroom activities, and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context. Language, Culture, and Teaching • explores how language and culture are connected to teaching and learning in educational settings; • examines the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language and culture to understand how these contexts may affect student learning and achievement; • analyzes the implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for classroom practices, school reform, and educational equity; • encourages practicing and preservice teachers to reflect critically on their classroom practices, as well as on larger institutional policies related to linguistic and cultural diversity based on the above understandings; and • motivates teachers to understand their ethical and political responsibilities to work, together with their students, colleagues, and families, for more socially just classrooms, schools, and society. Changes in the Third Edition: This edition includes new and updated chapters, section introductions, critical questions, classroom and community activities, and resources, bringing it up-to-date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in the U.S. and beyond. The new chapters reflect Nieto’s current thinking about the profession and society, especially about changes in the teaching profession, both positive and negative, since the publication of the second edition of this text.