Developing a Systematic and Schoolwide Focus on Learning
A Collective Focus on Purpose
Effect on School Culture
Celebrating the Success of All Stakeholders
Institutionalized Celebration
Impromptu Celebration
Celebration and Positive School Culture
Creating Systems of Support for Tweeners
Removing the Walls of Isolation
Providing Intensive Professional Development
Implementing Skillful Leadership and Focus
School Culture
Leadership
Believers
Tweeners
Survivors
Fundamentalists
Epilogue: A Significant Impact
Sample
Data Collection
Variables
About the Author
Anthony Muhammad, PhD, is a much sought-after educational consultant. A practitioner for nearly twenty years, he has served as a middle school teacher, assistant principal, and principal and as a high school principal. His Transforming School Culture framework explores the root causes of staff resistance to change.
Anthony’s tenure as a practitioner has earned him several awards as both a teacher and a principal. His most notable accomplishment came as principal of Levey Middle School in Southfield, Michigan, a National School of Excellence, where student proficiency on state assessments more than doubled in five years. Anthony and the staff at Levey used the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ process for school improvement, and they have been recognized in several videos and articles as a model high-performing PLC.
As a researcher, Anthony has published articles in several publications in both the United States and Canada. He is author of Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division; The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach: Transforming Schools at Every Level; and Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap: Liberating Mindsets to Effect Change and a contributor to The Collaborative Administrator.
To learn more about Anthony’s work, visit New Frontier 21 (www.newfrontier21.com), or follow @newfrontier21 on Twitter.
To book Anthony Muhammad for professional development, contact [email protected].
Foreword
By Richard DuFour and Rebecca DuFour
Dr. Anthony Muhammad has become a prominent voice for educational researchers and practitioners who have concluded that schools will not meet the unprecedented challenge of helping all students learn at high levels unless educators establish very different school cultures from those of the past. Structural changes—changes in policy, programs, schedules, and procedures—will only take a school so far. Substantive and sustainable school improvement will require educators to consider, address, and ultimately transform school culture—the assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and habits that constitute the norm for their schools.
In the second edition of Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division, Dr. Muhammad provides readers with access to an updated research base and reflections on the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Race to the Top (RTTT), and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). He challenges readers to seize the new opportunities for improving school culture as states and districts respond to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Dr. Muhammad continues to draw on and expand on his study of thirty-four schools from around the United States—eleven elementary, fourteen middle, and nine high schools—to describe the competition and underlying tension among four different groups of educators in a school:
1. The Fundamentalists preserve the status quo. They were successful as students in the traditional school culture, and they resent any attempts to change it.
2. The Believers are committed to the learning of each student and operate under the assumption that their efforts can make an enormous difference in that learning.
3. The Tweeners are staff members who are typically new to a school and are attempting to learn its prevailing culture.
4. The Survivors are those who have been so overwhelmed by the stress and demands of the profession that their primary goal becomes making it through the day, the week, and the year.
No one who has ever worked in a school will be able to read Dr. Muhammad’s descriptions without conjuring up images of specific colleagues who fall into each category. He points out, rightly, that in an organization as complex as a school, there is rarely a single “norm” that staff members embrace universally. There are, instead, competing assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and diverse opinions regarding such basic questions as, What is the fundamental purpose of this school? What are my responsibilities as an educator? What is the school we should strive to create? In this book, Dr. Muhammad provides strategies and guidance for transformational leaders to employ as they address the behaviors and professional learning needs of the members of each group while shaping a healthy school culture.
There is much to admire in this book. For example, Dr. Muhammad does not denigrate the members of any group. He describes educators as intelligent and concerned and acknowledges that each group is acting in accordance with what it perceives as its best interest. He emphasizes that a sense of moral purpose and the desire to help all students learn do not ensure an individual teacher is effective. He recognizes that an individual’s commitment to preserving the status quo does not make that person an ineffective classroom teacher. He found very effective classroom teachers among the Fundamentalists and very ineffective teachers among the Believers, despite their good intentions. He does not depict the tension between the factions in a school as a battle of good versus evil, but
