Redefining Teachers, Reculturing Schools: Connections, Commitments and Challenges

Abstract

While strategies of school restructuring often attend to the governance and descision-making, timetabling and programming aspects of school life as a lever for change, school reculturing buries deep into the heart of human attitudes and relationships that hold the school together and move it forward (or fail to do so). Drawing on four school case studies, Lynne Miller describes how successful school reculturing involves schools and their staff moving towards building professional community, putting learning before teaching, engaging in inquiry as a guide to improvement, developing their own systems of accountability and standards of learning, taking a whole-school focus, and widening the responsibilities for leadership.

Reculturing, Miller shows, is no easy matter. It depends on committing to long time frames, on the support of excellent principals, on teachers who are prepared to become leaders of their colleagues as well as teachers of their classes, on access to supportive networks outside the school, and so on. This chapter describes not only the theory and principles of reculturing, but conveys a vivid sense of what it means to try and reculture one’s school in particular cases.