Shaping school culture: pitfalls, paradoxes, and promises

Since the previous editions of both Shaping School Culture and The Shaping School Culture Fieldbook were published, many new challenges have emerged for school leaders, especially around issues of standards-based testing, school accountability, and student achievement. In this revised edition, the authors haveexpanded their model to address the latest thinking on organizational cultureand change and offer new ideas and strategies for strengthening and revitalizing school culture. Based on their extensive research and contacts with schoolleaders across the country, they feature new and powerful case examples of culture-based change. Many of their new stories reflect the struggles of educators to meet higher educational expectations with declining public support and resources, especially in urban schools. Showing leaders how a focus on values and beliefs can be used to solidify a schools purpose and identity, the book goes on to explain how rituals, ceremonies, metaphors, and school history can betapped to build healthy and vibrant learning communities. The book devotes particular attention to the symbolic role of school leaders and how they can actas artists, visionaries, and healers to infuse a school with passion and meaning. Most important, the authors show how negative and toxic cultures can be transformed so that trust, commitment, and sense of unity can prevail.

• ISBN: 978-0-7879-9679-6
• Editorial: Jossey Bass
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 304
• Fecha Publicación: 20/03/2009
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés