How Much Performance Culture Exists In Your School?

by Joe Schroeder, Ph.D. Associate Executive Director, AWSA

Perhaps the first and most important job of leadership is to cultivate the sort of organizational culture that will grow and sustain strong instruction so that student learning and well-being thrive.  At first blush, people naturally identify trust and sense of community as critical components of a strong culture.  But there is much more “under the hood” than that.  For years, we have asked school and district teams in our SAIL Academy to assess themselves via a tool called the Performance Culture Index.  Read on to see the instrument, how it is used, and what we have been learning to date.

The Performance Culture Index (Figure A) is a product of the Leadership and Learning Center, which has been providing world-class professional development with a focus on deep implementation for years.  This instrument is comprised of ten descriptive statements that essentially reflect what schools and districts with high-performance cultures do differently. The protocol for use of the tool consists of two steps:  (1) Individual leaders assess the current state of affairs in the school/district by marking their individual ratings for each of the ten items, (2) team members then collate individual scores from for each item and discuss them one by one in order to identify a consensus rating of the current state of a performance culture existent in the organization, which can serve as a baseline in monitoring future continuous improvement work. 

Figure A.  Performance Culture Index

Most people work through the instrument individually (Step 1) in a matter of minutes.  The follow-up team effort to identify the consensus rating of each item and discuss what the findings might mean for next steps of action (Step 2) typically takes around 20-30 minutes, thereby serving as a fairly efficient means of identifying both the current state of local affairs and some high-leverage areas for action.

Some interesting trends show up when we review the Performance Culture Index assessments of teams in our SAIL Academy across Wisconsin over the years.  Three areas regularly rated more lowly and thus self-identified by teams as opportunities for greatest growth are (with emphases made by the author):

  • My school/district routinely collects and shares data on adult practices to ensure deep implementation of specific strategies and to support all adult actions on student learning.

  • The school improvement plan at my school is a working document used by staff to monitor the effectiveness of adult actions on student learning.

  • Teams in my school/district reflect on the impact of these practices by using frequent formative assessments to determine student learning progress and use the results to make adjustments in teaching practice

As team members work through the tool to identify such needs, helpful reflective questions such as these often arise from the discussion: 

  • To what degree do we frame local improvement efforts within processes of ongoing inquiry and cycles of continuous improvement?  

  • To what degree are priority instructional practices within our school/district unclear and/or not regularly being monitored/supported?

  • To what degree are we compromising staff ability to develop collective efficacy without a regular focus upon formative assessment to inform instruction and/or upon the link of student learning evidence to the quality of adult practices overall?  

Regardless, as you can imagine, having a conversation upfront about the current state of affairs across a team’s members helps many teams identify a priority action area or two to take within their school/system -- and thereby engage in a host of proven practices of leading schools and districts over time so that they can ultimately make themselves into a high-impact performance culture, too.  In so doing, such teams begin to powerfully live out the credo: do it until you become it!  

So, are you and your team hungry to create a culture that builds the sort of collective efficacy in staff that John Hattie and others clearly link to significant gains in student learning?  If so, consider making use of the Performance Culture Index, to see firsthand how this instrument might assist your team and organization get the conversation and journey underway.

Reference

Lassiter, C. (2011). Leadership for a high-performance culture. Activate: A leader’s guide to people, practices, and 
              processes (pp. 57-90). Englewood, CO: Lead and Learn Press.

 

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