Principals send large cultural messages to staff and students with every decision regarding budgets, curriculum, instruction, as well as interactions with central office and community leaders. But principals also send hundreds of small cultural messages to students and teachers every day. In every interaction with a student or teacher, a principal telegraphs a message about his or her expectations for that school. That gives principals enormous opportunities to shape a school’s culture–for good or ill.

Some principals provide cultural leadership intuitively, said Kent Peterson, professor of educational administration at the University of Wisconsin and co-author with Terrence Deal of Shaping School Culture (Jossey-Bass, 1999). But all principals can learn to consciously identify culture-making opportunities and use them to influence teachers, students, and parents to move in a new direction, he said.

Peterson recalled one principal who recognized that he did not intuitively know when a "cultural moment" was presenting itself. So, using a 3x5 index card, he wrote down five elements of the school culture that he wanted to improve. He stuck the card in his shirt pocket and pulled it out throughout his day as a way to remind himself of questions he could ask.

"You can find ways to encourage yourself to be more conscious of this. Eventually, it becomes internalized," Peterson said.

Peterson also recalled shadowing a principal who found ways to blend administrative tasks with opportunities to influence attitudes in his building. This principal had to provide central office with the total number of ceiling tiles in his building. Rather than assign that task to a maintenance employee, the principal assumed the job himself. The principal’s arrival in each classroom was, of course, a big event to both students and teachers. In each classroom, he asked what students were learning that day and asked to see student work–then he counted the ceiling tiles. He had taken responsibility for a mundane task because it allowed him to connect with every classroom in the building and to send a message about the importance of students’ work.

Although principals are enormously influential, they alone cannot shape the culture of a school, Peterson said. "Culture is the accumulation of many individuals’ values and norms. It is a consensus about what’s important. It’s the group’s expectations, not just an individual’s expectations. It’s the way everyone does business," he said.

Teachers are especially important in influencing the direction of a school’s culture. Teachers connect with other teachers, with their students, and with the parents of their students. When teachers are sending a shared cultural message, that message reverberates throughout the entire school community.

As a veteran principal, Vydra believes no school can improve unless it has a culture that supports improvement and collaboration and a shared vision for what it wants to achieve. She also believes fervently that a school will improve only if it has a culture of caring. "If teachers don’t feel cared about, they can’t perform at optimum levels. If I care about the teachers, they will pass that on to the kids," she said.

When she arrived at Briar Glen five years ago, there was some tension in the school. Briar Glen, an award-winning school, had "wonderful teachers" who worked well within their teams, but spent most of their team time on organizational rather than instructional issues. Although wonderful things were happening in individual classrooms, there was little sense of an overall direction and no school improvement plan to guide their collective work. "There was no shared vision about what the school should be," she said.

Vydra began by telling the staff, "I’m going to walk in your shoes for a year. Then, whatever changes we make, we’re going to make together." High on Vydra’s agenda was ensuring that teachers could do the work they were hired to do.

"I don’t want anything on a teacher’s plate that doesn’t belong there. I want them to focus on their students and on the goals of our school improvement plan."

For example, rather than overloading teachers with excessive testing data and expecting them to wade through it, Vydra winnows the data down to what each teacher needs to know. Then, when she meets with teachers, they are able to focus on individual children who need assistance, rather than swimming through irrelevant numbers.

When teachers agreed that they wanted parents to have a better understanding of what children are expected to know and be able to do, Vydra wrote a grant that would enable her to give teachers summer stipends to prepare standards-based newsletters for distribution during the school year. "If I’m asking them to improve their communication with parents, I want to remove obstacles that prevent them from doing that. Time is an obstacle and this was a way to work around that," she said.

With that list, Vydra approached teachers and said, "You don’t have to do this, but this is very important to our parents. If we’re going to build our learning community, this is a good first step. If you’ll try to attend these specific events, I’ll tell parents that you won’t be at all the other events and meetings."

At the same time, Vydra thanked the teachers for their willingness to attend events by informing them that she would not enforce previously mandatory starting and ending times for the work day. "I trust these teachers. They don’t need to be told what time to get here or when they can leave. They’re going to be here."

The teachers quickly responded to the request and have made teacher attendance at the identified events part of the cultural norm.

"We’re more ready for that now. But I’m still careful to praise teams, not individuals," she said.

When personal praise is warranted, she writes personal notes instead of making a public statement. "In meetings, I might mention the example without mentioning the name," she said.

Vydra acknowledges that if she had entered a school with a "toxic culture," she would have responded differently. "If it’s a broken school and kids are being hurt and there is low achievement, there have to be some top-down initiatives.

"Shaping a culture takes time. Anything that is top-down will last only as long as the leader stays in that office. Then those ideas will evaporate and everything will go right back to the way it was," Vydra said.

But culture stays. "Culture protects a school and teachers from willy-nilly fads and from leaders who think they own the day," she said.