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“How do you measure school climate?” asked a principal at a district meeting of principals. The conversation focused on the annual school climate survey sent out. The question was more about whether the climate survey was paper-based or in a Google Form.

Note: This is an unfinished blog entry I started while researching Hattie’s take on leadership. I got to a certain point and realized it wasn’t getting me close to a usable blog entry for my work, so I archived it. After some reflection, I decided to archive it here and expand on some of the ideas a bit. 

Are Climate Surveys Trivial?

You know, I didn’t pay that much attention since climate surveys seemed so trivial (I’d helped campuses put a Google Form with all the questions). Why trivial? They seemed trivial for these reasons:

• Climate surveys happen at the end of the year, too late to really have an impact on issues
• Climate surveys were data collected by the people in charge about how they were doing. Did anyone in power actually expect to either get an honest answer from survey responders or expect responders to jeopardize their future with a truthful response featuring a situation that would identify them?
• As long as a climate survey is remotely positive, it’s ignored…”Carry on as always, or as you were”
• It wasn’t relevant to my work as a Director of Instructional Technology at the time in a large urban district…what a missed learning opportunity but hey, I had a million other pressing concerns (like i was presenting on a new initiative right after the lady with the climate survey question)

The Power of Reflection

One of the great aspects of reflection (and blogging) is the ability to look back on a situation and see it anew informed by fresh knowledge and experiences. The conversation I barely listened to (over 10 years ago) has stayed with me. As I’ve moved from district to district, I’ve had a chance to see how important climate is. I’m more in tune with it now as an administrator than I was when I was first starting out. It doesn’t mean my initial insights about when and who does climate surveys were wrong, they were insufficient.

“Learning isn’t linear; it’s recursive.”
Source: Visible Learning for Mathematics

You sense climate as soon as you walk into a building. May I share a story with you about that?

Don’t believe me? While working at an education service center, my colleague and I ventured onto a campus. With no one in sight, the building gave off a dark vibe. It was like a physical wave of desperate apathy (an oxymoron? can apathy be desperate? Maybe the word is “trapped”). People trapped with nowhere to go. It was shocking to my colleague and I. As a youngster, I couldn’t understand the whole “hostages to fate” quote, people locked into a job they couldn’t leave because options had narrowed to the point they couldn’t leave. So what they cannot cure, they endured. “I stay here because I’ve made my place, and I’ll just make the best of it for now.”

When we met with the principal, he was enthusiastic, excited about having us there. He appeared oblivious to the sense of foreboding and dark that hung over his building. We marveled at how…out of touch…he was.

The principal escorted us to the classroom teacher we were meeting with. He gushed about how wonderful she was, all the great work she was doing and hoped we would have a fruitful meeting.

In a matter of minutes, after her principal left, she confirmed what we had sensed, relating some of the experiences that led to the general malaise. The gushing principal was to blame, we discovered. He had dome some things the campus staff found objectionable, setting norms that resulted in bad feelings.

Years later, when I found myself in the same district as the principal, I discovered he had been promoted to oversight of a district level program. He was no longer a school principal, instead overseeing a program with a huge budget and few staff. I never went back to the school to see if it continued to wallow in despair. You may think I’m being dramatic but I can’t imagine teaching and learning in such an environment. Yet adults do every day. Maybe, we need to do something about that.

A Quick Insight

I share that story because school climate does have an effect on teaching and learning. We become inured to a toxic culture. Whether we want to or not, it has an effect on us, erodes our values and who we are even if we know to be on guard against it. I know this from personal experience. I worked for a short time in one district where the person in charge was a micro-manager for every person she supervised and project. She scheduled meetings at the time we were supposed to leave. It was oppressive and as a young educator, I felt trapped. Even when I knew what I should do to push back, I was afraid to.

Eventually, I left. I went to work in a different organization and it was like a breath of fresh air. I told my new supervisor at the time that it was like someone had held my heart in a vise but I hadn’t known it. Some of my best work resulted simply because I was not in that toxic environment.

Let’s explore the effects of school culture and climate. John Hattie’s Visible Learning assigns a significant effect size to school climate effects. That effect size is .43.

One way to think of culture and climate is to see it as norms and perceptions. That is, norms represent the culture. People’s perception of those norms, the climate. You use climate to measure the culture. The principal determines the culture and climate. If s/he fails in doing so, learning suffers. Climate is the gauge of a successful culture.

In one of the studies Hattie cites as part of his meta-analysis, the following appears:

That’s an important point. As someone who would never want to be a principal, the research and literature around culture and climate is foreign to me. I never paid attention to it as a school district administrator focused on educational technology. I simply wanted my team members to have the tools they needed, the support and have the freedom to create. Simply, I wanted to create situations that promoted authorship (to paraphrase leadership gurus, Bolman and Deal). However, I realize that principal leadership may have a whole different set of literature and research beyond leadership.

As a leader, my self-expectation was that I would create conditions that promote creativity, innovation, and freedom to experiment. I don’t know if that is transformational, but I was described by others in that way.  I never believed them due to my perpetual “imposter syndrome.” I suspect that my approach to leadership was fortunate when I worked with committed professionals.

This is certainly why I ended up having crucial confrontations every week for a year in a new post. When my leadership style ran across non-professionals who lacked commitment, as well as professionals who needed a bit more direction, my approach failed. That’s my fault. In my defense, even in my “educational leadership” (certainly an oxymoron) doctoral studies, I never got the tools or strategies. I’d also say that 95% of the leadership books (e.g. John Maxwell, a whole bunch of others) were completely aspirational/transformational and didn’t get me any closer to hands-on actual leadership.

You know, the get your hands dirty with grease, grime and guts. Absent that, I would be shocked to see anyone lead well. Now, I have those experiences and earning them was not pleasant. It made me appreciate the life of a scholar and I feel the pain of the principal in my story, but also that of the people he led ineptly.

Distinguishing Between What Works, What Doesn’t

In a 2019 conference presentation I attended for work, Hattie distinguishes between two types of leaders. The two types include transformational and instructional leaders. The former is the type of leader we all imagine we want and need. The truth is that the latter is the one that gets the results. Having spent significant time in doctoral educational leadership studies, this amazed me.

Hattie points out that Transformational Leadership (.11 effect size) is not as effective as instructional leadership. See the difference between the two in this blog entry.

You can see that instructional leadership is the world of data, of working side by side with teachers. I imagine it’s the grease, grime and guts part of leadership. The focus is on instructional issues, not motivation and support. It is about ensuring classroom environments are conducive to learning. The goal has to be on creating shared norms (culture) and shared perceptions (climate). When we measure the climate, we gain insight into the culture (MacNeil, et al., 2009) .

When I reflect on the chat with the teacher at the depressed campus, I get a few takeaways. Her perceptions (climate) reflected an unhealthy culture. You feel climate at a subconscious level. An unhealthy culture is not conducive to human beings and learning there.

Since the principal handles culture and climate, what can s/he do?

Bambrick-Santoyo’s book, Leverage Leadership, offers several levers that principals can pull. The author makes these points: