Creating a culture of teaching and learning in our schools seems like an obvious goal. After all, we are schools and teaching and learning is at the core of what we do. Cooki Levy and I were privileged to discuss these issues with leaders of Jewish schools across North America at our workshop at the conference in L. A. We were able to hear real life examples of ways leaders stay current with pedagogy, inspire teachers, reinforce teachers’ hard work, and partner with them to make a difference in the learning of their students.

There were so many questions that came up for us at the workshop. Many of those questions were about what it means to be an authentic leader, how to make a difference in culture when you are a new Head of School, and how this is different in a Jewish school with so many competing values.

After thinking for a while of all these ideas and questions, I realized this: We each lead our schools with our own lens. In each lens are five or six strong beliefs and passions that help us move our schools forward, make decisions, and create new vision. Those beliefs and passions permeate the culture of the school and are probably obvious to most people who are a part of the school. To the extent that those beliefs and passions reflect the mission of the school, there is more of a chance that that school will be successful at achieving that mission.

With changing models of leadership, and with many schools adopting a distributive leadership model, how does that change the role of the Head in establishing the culture? I actually do not think it does, except to emphasize the need to inspire other leaders within the school. It is important to be explicit about the way a school views teaching and learning.

This is just a bit of our thinking. We also were able to share some articles,:

http://edge.ascd.org

http://blogs.plsweb.com/

School culture is a broad topic and keeping the lens of teaching and learning is critical. We welcome your thinking.