What Is a School Culture Plan and Why You Need One

With such dramatic shifts in education over the past few years, school cultures have inevitably changed, as well. By implementing a school culture plan and actively guiding your school’s culture, you can ensure the community is developing in positive ways.

School culture and school climate are two distinct but related factors in educational institutions. A school’s values, rules, beliefs, practices, and expectations shape its culture. This culture is deeply rooted in a school and changes slowly, through long-term and deliberate plans. In contrast, a school’s climate is shaped by how the individuals in the organization think and feel about their experience there. Climates shift more quickly and easily than cultures and don’t rely on strategic effort for those shifts to occur.  

School culture operates on a different level than school climate. It requires a thoughtful and conscious effort to change, and that change can take a long time, often over many years. If your school doesn’t have a plan to make that effort, you could be missing out on realizing your full potential as an organization. That’s why you need a school culture plan.

A school culture plan reflects the shared vision of all stakeholders in the learning community. It also details actionable steps for the school to take to begin creating or improving upon its current culture.  

For example, if a school is experiencing significant problems with student behavior, it will want to make sure that its plan includes measurable action items to encourage respectful and positive interactions. The plan might include rolling out a new reward system in which teachers can give points to students that they may later redeem for items in the bookstore. Or the school may consider instituting a new disciplinary system that students and parents or guardians must agree to honor at the start of each school year.  

There are two key steps to take in developing any school culture plan:  

1. Meet your culture where it is. An honest assessment of the current culture means you can start your plan from a realistic place.  
2. Know what you want your culture to be. By establishing start and end points, you’ve created a roadmap for change.

No single school culture plan works for every school. Likewise, not all plans are created equal. Here are a few examples so you can get a sense of the many options available to your school.  

1. At the Medicine & Community Health Academy (MCH) in Detroit, the school wanted to improve its graduation and attendance rates and decrease the frequency of behavioral incidents. Their plan featured heavy integration of building-wide behavior expectations. 
2. At Princeton Community Middle School in Cincinnati, the administration wanted to increase on-task student behaviors in the classroom, reduce office referrals, reduce student tardies to class, reduce the number of out-of-school suspensions, and increase the number of teacher-written positive referrals. Their plan is lengthy and granular, emphasizing the use of data-driven goals and procedures.  
3. At the Cook Hill School in Wallingford, CT, the school identified its three primary goals: to reduce incidents of inappropriate behavior on the school bus, to increase the level of student and parent engagement, and to improve staff sentiment about feeling welcome, supported, and safe. Their plan explicitly names those involved in the action steps, as well as the time period when the plan tasks should be implemented, creating accountability for all involved.  

As when introducing any new plan, it’s important to think about how to address the concerns of those impacted. Be sure to think through your plan for collaboration and communication prior to implementing it.

Note that in the example plans above, each school strives to be data-focused while remaining student-centered. At the Medicine & Community Health Academy, the school culture plan details clear, data-driven strategies and tactics while also highlighting the importance of student expectations in contributing to the school’s desired culture.  

For example, MCH publishes the following expectations: Healing, Ownership, Purpose, and Engagement (HOPE), with a brief definition of each. These expectations are sandwiched between data points (graduation and attendance rates, behavior data, etc.) and a behavior matrix common to Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) plans. MCH says that these steps are helping them “move from anecdotal to evidence-based discussions about students.”  

Your learning management system (LMS) can be the hub for your school culture plan. In addition to storing the plan itself, the LMS can also curate and track data and is easily accessible even if team members are meeting from multiple locations, synchronously or asynchronously. 

Edtech tools are the digital backbone of 21st-century education. Still, technology cannot exist simply for its own sake if you are genuinely going to improve your school or district’s culture. Your technology should support your plan, not the other way around. Technology should make it easier to gather, curate, and discuss meaningful data rather than take the focus away from your improvement efforts. Ask “what should students know and be able to do?” rather than “what LMS should we use?”  

Your school or district’s culture can positively or negatively affect technology adoption and use in the classroom. Is there a culture of trust and open access between district leadership, teachers, and students in your school? What about in the classroom? Are your teachers comfortable taking risks and innovating in their approach? When the culture is healthy, investments in edtech can boost learning objectives. When the culture is defeatist, all the technology bells and whistles in the world won’t stave off curricular stagnation. Get the strategy and the plan right first and let that drive your edtech decisions. 

The past few years have taught us that we must always be ready and willing to change and adapt. Having a plan is essential and building flexibility into that plan means positioning yourself more strongly to achieve success. Then, no matter what’s happening beyond your campus, your school’s values, expectations, and data can reflect a healthy school culture in any learning scenario.