Shaping School Culture: Pitfalls, Paradoxes, and Promises



Shaping School Culture: Pitfalls, Paradoxes, and Promises

Introduction

The book Shaping School Culture: Pitfalls, Paradoxes, and Promises is written by Terrence E. Deal, Kent D. Peterson. In this book authors had suggested new ideas and thoughts for schools and their leaders. According to them, stories, rituals, traditions, and other cultural values can be used for creating purposeful, caring and learning based schools. On the other hand, authors strongly suggested the trust building between school leaders and parents. There are certain issues due to which parents lack trust on the school leadership. The authors emphasize on the fact that how school leaders can transform the negative and lethal culture in order to develop trust, commitment and sense of unity.

This book has a main focus on the environment of the school that can be change from inside through prudent policy making. They further suggested for removing toxic element from the school through the implementation of effective and efficient programs.

The routes of negativity is by authors, the dropping from the schools, evening family events, these lose the trust of parents on the leadership of the school. For effective and efficient learning within the school, the recruitment process has to be strengthening because these personals have a great role in the development of a child.

The authors relate their thinking with business models of relationships, performance and improvement. At the same time, they agree that business models and approaches do not work within the school step. School leaders have a pivotal role in the development of a school environment for learning and meaningful.

Key Leadership Emphasis

The first aspect of this book is to make a school as a source of learning with reference to the cultural norms and values. There are seven key emphases to eradicate negativity in order to bring clean and ordered cultured environment within the school. The first is to give people a chance to vent their venom, second is to support stuff and positive cultural elements, third is to recruit professional stuff, fourth is to celebrate for the positive aspects, fifth is to eradicate negativism by focusing on the positive aspects, sixth is to develop the latest stories of work and accomplishment and the last is help staff to find other places for work (OPSBA, 2013)

The authors also linked school with business leadership in order to match its performance. They agreed with the ...