In her article in this issue, Robyn Jackson highlights management guru Peter Drucker’s famous maxim that, when it comes to organizational success, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” This is an apt sentiment for educational leaders today. In a time of significant change and increasingly complex challenges in education, the strength of school or district’s professional culture may be the difference between thriving as a learning organization or sinking under the weight of disparate strategies and initiatives.
But how do leaders develop strong instructional cultures—ones that drive transformational learning experiences, support educators’ capacity and professional growth, and foster coherence and joy? That’s the question at the heart of this issue of Educational Leadership. And while the educator-authors gathered here offer powerfully distinct ideas and approaches in response, some important common themes emerge. These may be helpful to consider as you read or discuss the issue and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of your own school or district’s instructional culture.
Set the vision. To create strong instructional cultures, leaders must develop a clear and compelling instructional vision. This may sound obvious, but, as Jackson and others point out, schools’ instructional visions are often vague or platitudinous—or buried beneath a multi-year build-up of initiatives and programs. Using holistic data and input from teachers, leaders should clearly identify what high-quality instruction looks like in their school and establish specific—and distinctly actionable—instructional priorities and learning goals. As leaders in the Glen Cove City, NY, School District write, this creates purpose and alignment, which in turn are critical to increasing trust and understanding among teachers.
Uproot inherited misconceptions. An important next step is to support teachers in developing practices that reflect the school’s instructional vision. But as Jim Knight notes, many educational leaders unconsciously gravitate toward outmoded ideas and conventions that obstruct healthy change and lead to stagnant, top-down professional learning environments. These include the notions that workshops are effective levers of improvement, that teachers’ perspectives are secondary, and that new practices must be executed with absolute fidelity. As Knight and others emphasize, these ideas must be countered before genuine professional learning—that is, professional learning that starts with teachers’ and students’ real-life experiences and needs in the classroom—can take root.
One easy way to read a school’s instructional culture is by how teachers feel about their development and sense of purpose as educators.
Leverage teacher voice and expertise. Teachers can in fact be instrumental in leading change and shaping effective instructional cultures, and leaders should seek to tap into and build on their knowledge and perspectives. In his article, principal M-J Mercanti-Anthony highlights the value of instructional leadership teams made up of committed and open-minded teachers. In his school, the teacher-led ILT explores and creates implementation plans for research-based practices, in effect creating shared ownership of instructional priorities and expertise. Similarly, researcher Annie Sussman emphasizes the role of empowered teacher leaders in “developing cultures of learning and reflection” that ground change “in collective growth and action.”
Create paths for collaborative learning. Along the same lines, leaders can create structured opportunities for teachers to learn from and with each other. As Ann Mausbach and Jenni Donohoo write, “vicarious experiences”—when teachers get a chance observe and reflect on other teachers’ practice—increase teachers’ sense of efficacy and deepen “shared theories of learning.” Likewise, Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, Lauren Szczesny, and Tess Bernhard highlight the potential of teacher “learning labs” to create spaces where educators can work collaboratively on problems of practice and, like students, gain from a sense of productive struggle in their work. These collaborative teaching forums, they write, “give teachers the support to take risks, question their practice, and learn from each other in real time.”
As that statement makes clear, healthy instructional cultures are deeply growth oriented. Indeed, one easy way to read a school’s instructional culture is by how teachers feel about their development and sense of purpose as educators. That’s always about more than strategy.
