Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin - Creating a Positive School Culture: How Principals and Teachers Can Solve Problems Together

Copyright 2004 by Corwin Press

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Anthony Paular

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-554-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-971-9

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

I n the past decade, an increasing amount of pressure has been placed on school staffs to teach an expanding curriculum. At the same time, resources were decreased, responsibilities grew, and less time was made available for teachers to support each other.

As a result, issues often develop among staff members, such as negativity, isolation, or censure. This can cause principals and teachers to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy addressing these problems instead of focusing on academia, their initial goal. Educators and students alike may suffer.

Our intention in this book is to assist principals, with the collaboration of teachers, support staff, and parents, to form a school culture in which rich, supportive, and energizing relationships will be enhanced. Specifically, the purpose of this book is to help educators find efficient ways to understand and solve staff problems, prevent conflicts, and generally enrich their school culture. With that in mind, we gently invite readers to reflect on somewhat controversial questions and make visible the challenges of the current school system. Once visible, these challenges can be contained and practices can be developed to bring forth each persons wisdom and compassionate self. Narrative therapy, considered the cutting edge in systemic approaches, has been a very relevant theoretical framework to understand and address school culture issues. It offers a contextual perspective that fosters respect and awareness, and contributes to bringing the best out in everyone.

We have made every possible effort to write this book in a practical, clear, and creative way. Tutorials, exercises, common questions and answers, transcripts of conversations, illustrations, cartoons, dialogues between the authors, and numerous examples are used to keep the readers engaged with the material. This work is the result of many years of successful collaboration between a narrative therapist, consulting with several school principals, and a dedicated elementary school teacher. By combining therapeutic knowledge with day-today educational experience, the text provides a rich and comprehensive approach to a vast array of staff-related problems.

This book is not intended as an introduction to narrative therapy but rather as the application of narrative and social constructionist ideas to the field of education. For that reason narrative concepts are only covered in their relevance to teachers and principals, and the clinical practices associated with the ideas are not thoroughly examined. The interested reader can easily find further information on the subject in the many excellent introduction to narrative therapy books readily available (Bird, 2000; Freeman & Combs, 1996; Freeman, Epston, & Lobovits, 1997; Madsen, 1999; Winslade & Monk, 1999; White & Epston, 1990; Winslade & Monk, 2000; Zimmerman & Dickerson, 1996).

Embedded in the spirit of the narrative approach is the belief in local knowledges and in the wisdom of lived experience. Expertise is assumed to develop from the handling of everyday life and not simply from theoretical conceptualization. With that in mind, we could write a book marrying the narrative approach and education only by recruiting educators to share their experiences. We believe this has significantly enriched the material that we present and certainly inspired us greatly in the ideas that we propose. As a result, we have interviewed and/or surveyed well over 200 educators from a wide range of elementary and middle public schools in Northern California. The populations in these schools varied in terms of socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity. Schools were visited in rural and suburban areas as well as in the city. Four schools involved parent participation, while the remaining were general public schools. The questionnaires, surveys, and interview format for this research are included in Resources D and E.

From those conversations we have extracted pressures, struggles, solutions, and reflections that color each individuals journey in schools. We have integrated all of the emerging themes into different sections. The first chapter of the book explores the experiences of principals and teachers in the subculture of the school system. Our intention in writing this section is to foster a greater understanding of peoples struggles and experiences in schools, regardless of their respective roles. It covers in particular the pressures that constrain their ways of being and includes quotes from our research that reveal both the humor and hardship of the job. offers brief suggestions and perspectives for working with other adults in the school, such as parents and yard duty volunteers.

We hope that all readers will be inspired by at least one of the ideas exposed and will finish their reading energized to explore new possibilities with their colleagues. Above all, we hope that the book will bring forth more appreciation and compassion for yourself and the dedicated members of your community.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

As in our first book of this project, Breaking the Culture of Bullying and Disrespect , Grades K8, we would like to express our gratitude to all the educators who have participated in our research. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the staff from the following schools who have taken the time to kindly answer our lengthy surveys: Anderson School, Baker School, Country Lane School, Easterbrook School, Moreland Discovery School, and Rogers Middle School. Heartfelt acknowledgments are sent to those teachers from other schools across California who opened their classrooms to us: Sequoia Baioni, Maria Diaz-Albertini, Melissa Freeberg, Mariah Howe, Cathy Klein, Karen Lam, Kayla Meadows, Peter Murdock, Mary Robson, Sara Saldana, Chris Telles, the staff at Christa McAuliffe, Stuart Williams, and the staff at Cedarwood Sudbury School.

Interviews and e-mails with the following educators were also invaluable in that they provided a rich forum for personal stories and for in-depth accounts of their experiences in the education system. Given that some of these interviews were lengthy, often from one to two hours, we are eternally thankful for their trust, honesty, and generosity of time despite their busy schedules:

Les Adelson, Carolyn Barrett, Ann Dubois, Honey Berg, Martha Cirata, Nancy Cisler, Denise Clay, Carin Contreras, Harry Davis, Mindy Dirks, Bob Geddes, Maria Hansen-Kivijarvi, Faith Johnson, Tom Kennedy, Mary Anne Landis, Rick Ito, Sue Healy, Dale Jones, Debbie Judge, Barbara Lateer, Michele Mandarino, Heidi Meade, Bill Menkin, Alison Moser, Cleo Osborn, Joe Pacheco, Beverly Prinz, Herb Quon, Jim Richie, Lorie Rizzo, Kathleen Ryan, Louise Santos, Maria Simon, Bitsey Stark, Gary Stebbins, Mary Alice Tallahan, Stephany Tyson, Tiffany White, John Wise, and Jenny Wishnac.