Book summary “Shaping school culture”: summary

Introduction

You often rely on rigid accountability and structural mandates to improve your school, yet test scores stagnate and staff morale declines. You implement new programs, reorganize schedules, and enforce stricter rules, but these mechanical fixes fail to ignite lasting change.

School performance and reform success depend heavily on internal culture, shared norms, and symbolic leadership rather than structural changes alone. You must look beyond charts and policies to understand the deep symbolic fabric of your institution.

Terrence E. Deal and Kent D. Peterson reveal how you can use symbols, history, stories, rituals, and informal networks to shape a vibrant school culture.

• How do myths and values guide daily decisions?
• What role do ceremonies play in uniting a staff?
• How can you transform a toxic environment into a productive workplace?

1. Schools as Tribes

A school leader's primary obligation is to build the culture of the school through a comprehensive set of personal and professional capacities.

You must look beyond structural changes to build a thriving culture. A school functions best when it operates like an ancient tribe.

Architecture and Symbols

Architecture, physical artifacts, and spatial layout can be intentionally designed to embody a school's core cultural values and heritage.

In 1980, Ganado Primary School had one of the worst school buildings in Arizona. The new facility was built with a central library, a meeting room shaped like a traditional Navajo Hogan, and four distinct quadrants representing the four sacred directions and core values.

The school entry courtyard features a sculptural likeness of Spider Rock. This 800-foot sandstone pinnacle from Canyon de Chelly symbolizes where Spider Woman gave the Navajo the knowledge of weaving, connecting students to tribal history.

The C Diet Framework

Sigmund Boloz served as principal of Ganado Primary School for 20 years, guiding its transformation into an award-winning school of excellence. He outlined a systematic C Diet framework detailing specific attributes you must cultivate within the staff:

• Keep the compass
• Massage change
• Build credibility: a positive image for the school in the eyes of the community
• Cultivate my staff
• Ask the compelling questions
• Be an advocate for children
• Build confidence in themselves, in their decisions, and in their teaching
• Build courage to take risks and to break new ground
• Build compassion for children and others
• Build character to always do their personal best
• Build competence that they know the current trends
• Build capacity to learn new things
• Build commitment to our mission
• Build clarity a good focus on the whats and the hows
• Build consciousness to bring thinking to a higher level
• Build communication open lines of dialog
• Build collaboration share expertise
• Build connectedness bonding to each other and our mission
• Build collegiality professional interactions
• Build challenge to keep staff on their cutting edge
• Build critical thinking thoughtfulness
• Build creativity to implement innovations
• Build curiosity actively seek better ways
• Build contentment feel accepted

2. Symbols of Culture

Symbols act as outward manifestations of intangible cultural values, beliefs, and shared commitments, deeply influencing thoughts, motivation, and behavior.

Symbols serve as cultural rallying points that capture and communicate sacred commitments which are difficult to express rationally. Tampering with cherished symbols, regardless of your perceived negativity, carries profound emotional risks because meaning resides in the heart of the beholder.

A new middle school principal secretly removed an aggressive mascot named Mr. Meany during Thanksgiving break. This sparked covert hallway resistance and whispering until a custodian revealed staff members had rescued the figure and hung it in a classroom.

Artifacts and Architecture

Physical artifacts transform schools into meaningful sanctuaries rather than dead bureaucratic vessels. Rich symbolic artifacts celebrate accomplishment, parade iconic learning, and visually anchor the core purpose and diversity of a community. Children spend 14000 hours inside a school building over twelve years of schooling. Architecture and physical environments communicate deep underlying values, signal organizational priorities, and foster community pride.

The Oneida Nation Elementary School is shaped like a giant turtle to reflect the nation's creation story, symbolically carrying the hopes and dreams of the community on its back. Audubon Elementary maintains a Hall of Honor where every award received by a student or teacher, along with published newspaper articles and poetry, is matted and framed.

You can use specific practices to anchor your culture:

• Display enlarged mission statements in main hallways and classrooms
• Festoon school halls with displays of student work to celebrate creativity
• Exhibiting awards, trophies, and academic honors prominently alongside or surpassing sports
• Creating historical artifact displays showing past textbooks and writing tools

Living Logos

School leaders function as living logos, broadcasting powerful symbolic signals through their daily routines, language, actions, and interactions. Every mundane activity communicates core ideals and shapes the cultural tone of the institution.

Barbara Karvelis spends time on the playground at Edison Elementary connecting with students, talking with parents, and leading the Pledge of Allegiance despite administrative duties.

3. History and Lore

All institutions are products of history and utilize interpretations of past events to make choices. Without a shared historical map, your school's ethos splinters and leaves the organization vulnerable to temporary fads. You operate within a United States of Amnesia if you ignore these cultural roots.

Understanding and revisiting a school's history is essential to nurturing positive developments, interpreting negative events, and avoiding historical amnesia.

In 1991, the West Palm Beach School District held a kick-off event where hundreds of administrators grouped by their decade of joining to recount their heritage through raps, skits, and poems.

Historical Inquiry

Just as a therapist reviews a patient's history to diagnose current conditions, you must unearth documents, artifacts, and stories to understand the foundational roots of current norms, conflicts, and reforms. You must perform this historical inquiry before attempting to restore or renew culture.

In 2000, Monona Grove High School used the passage into the new millennium to perform an archeological excavation of its past, culminating in senior staff ceremonially handing new staff pieces of the old school.

When you begin exhuming the past, follow these steps:

• Observe and ask how long the school has existed and why it was built
• Identify the first staff members, administrators, and those who had major influence
• Examine core founding values and how the mission and values changed over time
• Determine what critical incidents occurred in the past and how they were resolved
• Review how the school responded to past internal and external reform efforts

Back to the Future

Revitalizing an organization requires reaching back to pull forward forgotten or discarded cultural values rather than constantly chasing ungrounded new reforms. When you fuse historical prototypes and original spirit with current realities, you successfully bind disparate subgroups together in a common quest instead of leaving them divided by cynicism.

At Delta Corporation, 3500 employees and managers were clustered into distinct subcultures and silos. The CEO opened a management retreat with stories of the creative founder and displayed his primitive first invention in the center of the room to spark dialogue between shop floor workers and veteran engineers.

4. Myth, Vision, and Values

Organizations anchor their worldview and channel behavior through a unifying myth or core story born out of early beginnings or major predicaments.

Without a core story, group efforts become fragmented into subgroups, bureaucratic routines, educational fads, or toxicity. These root narratives spell out how the group came to be, its core beliefs, and what would be lost if it ceased to exist.

Bill Bowerman invented Nike's waffle sole using a waffle iron and liquid rubber. Another example is a Domino's Pizza outlet whose delivery dough ran out, leading employees to wear black mourning bands for a month and reinforcing total dedication to service.

Visions do not simply appear from thin air. Instead, they emerge serendipitously from real-world experience, experimentation, and accidents.

Kellogg's breakfast cereals originated from boiled wheat left to turn cold. 3M's Post-it Notes were created because an unsuccessful adhesive failed to stick well, which turned out to be exactly what a scientist needed for bookmarks in his hymnal.

Measuring school success purely through narrow external metrics like test scores undermines the deeper purpose of education and erodes teacher morale. Focusing exclusively on test scores, athletics, elite scholars, or superficial changes turns schools into sterile environments. Authentic purposes must speak to human hearts and focus on significant learning and character development for all students. Friday Night Lights describes how communities can become dangerously obsessed with winning high school football games rather than broader learning outcomes.

Purpose and Success

Cultural depth in schools is maintained through an interplay of conscious values, unmeasurable beliefs, preconscious assumptions, and unstated behavioral norms. Values define standards of excellence, beliefs act as cognitive views of truth resting on faith, assumptions form deeply embedded perceptions, and norms function as behavioral blueprints or sea anchors that maintain stability. The Edina Minnesota school district came to a core credo after a superintendent's suicide: Edina. We care. We share. We dare.

Behavioral Blueprints

Schools operate under specific informal norms that can either foster a supportive community or create a toxic, dysfunctional environment. Identifying and managing these behavioral guidelines allows you to reinforce positive collaboration and root out negative habits like silence, blaming, or isolation. An elementary principal in a rough rural setting successfully handled an irate father by calmly replying that the principal was not there right now.

You can establish productive behavioral blueprints by following specific practices:

• Treat all people with respect.
• Be willing to take on responsibilities.
• Aspire to initiate changes to improve performance.
• Encourage those who suggest new ideas.
• Help new staff members become acclimated.
• Be conscious of costs and the use of resources.
• Speak with pride about the school and your unit.
• Enjoy and be enthusiastic in your work.
• Be helpful and supportive of others.
• Share useful information and new ideas.
• Tell stories that recognize the contributions of others.
• Thank others who have helped and supported you.
• Solve problems together when they occur.
• Work hard and have fun.
• Place the needs of students above personal agenda.
• Find ways to expand one's own learning.
• Be trustful, authentic, and honest.
• Feel a sense of responsibility for student learning.
• Culturally respect all and care deeply about people.

5. Stories and Tales

Stories are powerful cognitive tools that carry organizational values, solve communication problems, and make abstract ideas understandable and memorable.

Humans are biologically hardwired to remember stories over raw facts. Only 5 percent of people remember facts from a speech, while 63 percent remember stories. You can use little stories as the language of leadership to motivate people and transmit culture.

Chancellor Joe Wyatt quieted a noisy Vanderbilt graduation crowd by telling a story about a graduating senior who purchased blue irises for everyone against university policy.

Effective school storytelling must incorporate all major school constituencies into a shared cultural quest. Everyday tales highlight small breakthroughs and personal dedications that weave the cultural fabric.

A custodian named Johnny got his arm trapped between bleachers overnight while cleaning, yet continued to learn student names and maintain a spotless school with a prosthetic arm. Another tale follows Samuel, a seven-year-old truant student who experienced a reading breakthrough. A retired teacher received a grateful call from a former student 30 years later.

The Educational Campfire

Successful institutions periodically gather their members around an educational campfire to share legends and process tragedies. Beaverton Public Schools held annual pits and berries retreats where 200 principals, supervisors, and district personnel swapped stories of their best and worst moments.

You can convene similar storytelling sessions by following these steps:

• Put people together in a circle.
• Invite participants to tell stories about their work.
• Allow time for initial hesitation to pass so group energy can escalate.

6. Rituals and Ceremonies

Rituals act as behavioral glue that holds a school together, providing necessary spiritual fuel and preventing the culture from becoming empty, sterile, and bureaucratic.

Without periodic expressive events, organizations lose their way and become a cacophony of bureaucratic compliance. Rituals allow people to act out unseen core values in a collective setting, reinforcing purpose and direction.

Mrs. Krantz, a fifth-grade teacher, read adventure stories to her tired students every day after lunch, creating a calming, predictable ritual that built a shared class identity.

Types of Rituals

Schools utilize specific types of rituals to navigate changes and bond communities. Each ritual category addresses a distinct organizational need.

You can use these specific practices:

• Greeting rituals: connect people through boisterous welcomes or high-fives.
• Transition rituals: bridge changes by honoring old methods before embracing new ones.
• Battle-preparation rituals: motivate students and staff before high-stakes challenges.
• Initiation rituals: connect newcomers through veteran-led storytelling or creative introductions.
• School improvement rituals: align data-driven planning with core teaching values.
• Rites of passage rituals: provide compassion and recognition when periods end.
• Playful rituals: reduce stress and build bonds through humor and laughter.

At Ganado Primary, visitors are guided by energetic Navajo tour guides wearing special vests who show student work and share the school's purpose.

Ceremonies and Traditions

Ceremonies are grand, less frequent culturally sanctioned occasions where organizations celebrate successes, spotlight core values, and honor employee contributions. While rituals happen daily or weekly, ceremonies provide major emotional touchpoints throughout the school year.

Traditions serve as bookmarks in the passage of time, anchoring organizations in a revered past so they can weather modern challenges and changes.

At Mary Kay seminars, a salesperson battling breast cancer removed her wig on stage and inspired thousands with her message that anyone can succeed. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a tradition involves placing bronze plaques denoting the birthplaces of major discoveries that served the public.

7. The Informal Network

Every school has an unofficial, supportive cultural network of players whose unacknowledged roles keep the school culture on track.

While official leaders manage formal structures, an off-the-record network of staff members maintains the deeper purposes, history, and values of the school. You will find these people acting as a bridge between administration and staff.

A custodian in a large urban junior high school served as the priest, counseling new teachers on the Washington Way, running parent conferences, and guarding historical roots.

Cultural Conveyors

Priests and priestesses act as guardians of cultural values, holding confidences and gently steering new leaders away from disruptive changes. They create safe havens for staff and students, hold confessionals, and ensure cherished values are passed to new hires. They can quietly derail a new principal's unreflective reforms through strategic conversations that trigger superintendent and school board interventions.

In an Atlanta elementary school, the school secretary Mrs. Simpson was the ordained priestess, running the school while principal Mr. Salazar handled official duties, as denoted by their parking spots.

Storytellers and gossips use narratives and the informal grapevine to bind people to cultural values and distribute real-time information. Storytellers see drama in mundane happenings and use vivid narratives of success to inspire commitment, which resonates more deeply than quantitative data. Gossips maintain major informal networks, providing scuttlebutt on decisions and personnel early and accurately through both old-fashioned sources and social media.

Schools feature covert spies who acquire intelligence and heroic figures who serve as emblems and exemplars of core values. Spies operate in a clandestine underworld passing intelligence, while heroes and heroines inspire others to see novel vistas through everyday excellence. One school's hero was a custodian of twenty-five years who painted two classrooms every summer until he had painted the entire school twice before retiring.

Beyond universal roles, individual schools develop homegrown cultural roles like navigators, nodes, and spirit guides to satisfy unique symbolic needs. Navigators steer the school clear of unfamiliar shoals, nodes rapidly circulate technical information like computer routers, social media gurus handle digital communications, and compasses and spirit guides maintain focus on deep educational truths and ancestral wisdom.

Noxious Networks

Toxic cultures harbor a noxious informal network whose avowed mission is to perpetuate a pessimistic status quo and sabotage improvements. Destructive spies, saboteurs, and pessimistic taletellers use people's weaknesses and negative legends to squash innovations. They depress willingness to change and drag enthusiasm down into a powerful pocket of incompetence.

At a high school, a persistent negative legend known as the Tale of the Thirty-Four Graduates of Westchester High School Who Were in Prison shaped how people felt about student potential, eclipsing hundreds of successful graduates.

Toxic informal roles include negaholics, prima donnas, resource vultures, and deadwood who drain energy and promote self-interest. Negaholics find something negative in every new idea, prima donnas demand the spotlight, resource vultures hoard equipment leaving rooms empty for successors, and deadwood teachers refuse to do work or retire, sometimes getting sequestered into rubber rooms.

Apathy farmers and devils actively cultivate disengagement and malicious mediocrity, undermining the confidence of colleagues and students. Devils take delight in undercutting peers, leaking negative information, and designing impossible exams to reinforce a commitment to poor teaching. Apathy farmers breed anemic departments prone to lethargy and boredom.

A league of Lucifers banded together in a high school to form a Turkey Club where they reveled in being turkeys, belittling students, and derailing the new principal.

School leaders must actively manage informal networks by nurturing positive cultural players and reducing the impact of negative ones. You should apply these specific network practices:

• Know who resides in the central roles of the network
• Consult priests or priestesses at critical junctures, especially before launching major changes
• Provide stages for storytellers
• Anoint heroes and heroines whenever possible
• Use gossips to pass information
• Reinforce the compasses
• Nurture the nodes
• Listen to your navigators
• Find spirit guides for support and direction

8. Weaving the Cultural Tapestry

Plagiarizing an administrative style or importing a ready-made template provides only temporary comfort. Real cultural identity requires adapting indigenous symbolic elements like purpose, rituals, history, and architecture to local conditions.

School principals must avoid copying admired schools or following generic recipes, instead building thriving cultures using local resources and community expectations.

Pathways to Fruitful Cultures

According to Burton Clark, organizational culture shifts occur either when a brand-new organization is launched, when an existing organization becomes open to cultural evolution, or when a severe crisis forces an organization to reexamine traditional ways.

Deborah Meier and colleagues launched Central Park East Secondary School in New York City in 1985 to counter poor performance in traditional high schools, linking up with the Coalition of Essential Schools for external expertise.

Transforming Schools

Transforming a school requires specific foundational actions from you:

• Engage faculty, parents, and students in extended dialogues regarding future directions using research and performance data
• Move beyond the belief that all children can learn to address specific questions about expectations, support, and commitments
• Eliminate remedial programs that perpetuate low performance and provide additional time and assistance
• Initiate peer recognition rituals to celebrate extraordinary staff efforts

You can also use targeted instructional and community methods to rebuild culture:

• Utilize faculty meetings for Socratic dialogue focusing on instruction and student learning instead of administrative trivia
• Offer Fabulous Friday mini-courses for students to explore new content
• Provide Parent University courses to foster parental involvement and trust
• Hold small discussion groups in parents homes through Gente a Gente
• Formulate and articulate a clear, student-focused mission statement
• Clean, paint, and landscape the physical plant to convey a loving, well-tended environment
• Launch after-school programs to expand student learning experiences
• Organize hallway Clapout parades to honor students for accomplishments like perfect attendance
• Recite an all-school student pledge every morning during the morning meeting
• Identify an annual school theme with input from the student council
• Display the school mission and yearly theme visually across hallways and websites
• Hold monthly Dinner Seminars for new staff members to build trust and discuss difficulties

9. Transforming Toxic Cultures

Toxic school cultures mirror positive ones in having values, rituals, and networks, but these elements take on a debilitating negative valence that drains energy and damages learning.

Negative values replace uplifting ones. Schools fracture into isolated and warring silos. Hostility and bullying become normalized among adults. Informal networks are dominated by pessimists and rumormongers who drive out positive talent.

At Jefferson High School in California, negativity replaced optimism, dropout rates soared, and disgruntled teachers formed a Turkey Club to mock students and plot against the administration.

School leaders can unravel a healthy culture either by commission through damaging key symbols and pronouncing negative values, or by omission through neglecting core traditions and focusing exclusively on test scores. Cultural decline often starts when a new principal fails to understand the historical evolution of values, drops valued cultural customs, eliminates shared planning time, or replaces the joy of learning with a narrow focus on test data.

At 3M, the introduction of Six Sigma metrics by James McNerney in 2001 led to a rapid slowdown in innovation and pushed the company toward toxicity.

Pathways to Negativity

Toxic schools contain an informal network of negative players whose avowed mission is to perpetuate a pessimistic status quo. These informal roles actively undermine positive efforts, spread disparaging remarks, and create a septic social space that damages collaboration. You face destructive spies, saboteurs, keepers of the nightmare, negaholics, and apathy farmers.

Antidotes for Negativism

Combating entrenched negativity requires radical interventions like funerals and exorcisms to help a school community break emotional attachments to a toxic past. Because traditional strategies often fail, you must take extreme risks to challenge cynicism, allow structured venting followed by corrective action, and rebuild on positive customs.

A middle school principal borrowed a casket from a local funeral home to symbolically bury ignorance with a pastor's eulogy and a mirror at the bottom of the coffin.

To reverse these conditions, you must apply specific remedies:

• Identify which negative informal roles exist in the school
• Understand the impact of these roles on staff members and students
• Work to neutralize the impact of these individuals and end their reign of terror
• Confront the negativity head on and give people a chance to vent their venom in a public forum
• Shield and support positive cultural elements and staff members
• Focus energy on the recruitment, selection, strong positive socialization, and retention of effective, positive staff members
• Rabidly celebrate the positive and the possible
• Concisely and directly focus on eradicating the negative and rebuilding on positive customs and beliefs
• Help staff members find other places to work that fit their values
• Develop and share new stories of success, renewal, and accomplishment

10. Building Trust and Leadership

School leaders can strengthen and shape culture by assuming eight essential symbolic roles inspired by anthropology, history, and sociology.

Effective leadership is not concentrated in a single person. You share it among staff and community. By adopting specific symbolic roles, you reinforce core mores, values, and beliefs through everyday actions, rituals, and communications.

Eight Essential Roles

• Historian: seeks to understand the social and normative past of the school
• Anthropological sleuth: explores and probes for the current array of cultural traditions, values, and beliefs
• Visionary: works with others, including leaders in the neighborhood community, to characterize a portrait of the superlative school
• Icon or Champion: affirms values through dress, behavior, attention, actions, and routines
• Potter: shapes and is shaped by the school's symbolic webbing and brings in staff who share core values
• Poet: uses expressive language and images to reinforce values and sustain the school's best image of itself
• Actor: improvises in the school's predictable dramas, comedies, and tragedies
• Healer: oversees transitions and changes, and heals the wounds of conflict and loss

The Bifocal Principal

Effective school principals must become bifocal leaders who embrace paradox. You balance technical management with symbolic artistry rather than falling into dualistic either-or thinking.

Pat Bower studied a hospital administrator, a grocery store manager, and a high school principal over a three-year period. She discovered that three highly effective leaders used mixed signals that provided balance and unity instead of single-minded directives. Staff members understood these varied positions as complementary parts of a dynamic continuum.

You must master the bifocal ability to view schools simultaneously as productive factories and value-shaping temples. You navigate five central paradoxes: the paradox of purpose, people, change, action, and leading. You balance technical demands with cultural needs while maintaining dynamic tension without relying on either-or solutions.

Conclusion

School performance and reform success depend heavily on internal culture, shared norms, and symbolic leadership rather than structural changes alone.

You can shape your school culture by treating your organization as a tribe rather than a mere bureaucracy. You connect daily actions to deeper values by using symbols, history, myths, stories, rituals, and ceremonies. You recognize that structural changes fail unless you address the informal networks and underlying cultural currents of your community.

1. Assess your school culture regularly to identify toxic patterns, destructive lore, and misaligned values.
2. Honor your school history by preserving foundational stories, honoring veterans, and celebrating positive traditions.
3. Establish regular rituals and ceremonies to mark transitions, build community, and reinforce shared commitments.
4. Engage informal network players such as cultural keepers, gossips, and hidden leaders to support positive developments.
5. Embody symbolic leadership through multiple roles including historian, anthropologist, poet, actor, and healer.

10 Key Ideas

1. School performance and reform success depend heavily on internal culture, shared norms, and symbolic leadership rather than structural changes alone.
2. Symbols act as outward manifestations of intangible cultural values, beliefs, and shared commitments, deeply influencing thoughts, motivation, and behavior.
3. Understanding and revisiting a school's history is essential to nurturing positive developments, interpreting negative events, and avoiding historical amnesia.
4. Organizations anchor their worldview and channel behavior through a unifying myth or core story born out of early beginnings or major predicaments.
5. Stories are powerful cognitive tools that carry organizational values, solve communication problems, and make abstract ideas understandable and memorable.
6. Rituals act as behavioral glue that holds a school together, providing necessary spiritual fuel and preventing the culture from becoming empty, sterile, and bureaucratic.
7. Every school has an unofficial, supportive cultural network of players whose unacknowledged roles keep the school culture on track.
8. School principals must avoid copying admired schools or following generic recipes, instead building thriving cultures using local resources and community expectations.
9. Toxic school cultures mirror positive ones in having values, rituals, and networks, but these elements take on a debilitating negative valence that drains energy and damages learning.
10. School leaders can strengthen and shape culture by assuming eight essential symbolic roles inspired by anthropology, history, and sociology.