Culture Making: Creating & Changing The "Micro Cultures" of Professional Learning Communities

In his fine book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, author Andy Crouch explains his premise that it is not enough to condemn, critique, consume, or copy culture. The only way to change culture is to cultivate and create it.

Professional Learning Communities, School Leadership Teams, grade level teams, etc. are, in essence, mirco cultures. A micro culture is a small unit of culture within a wider general culture. In other words, the grade level or department level PLC is a micro culture within the great culture of the school site and the school district.

Thus the micro culture of the PLC is subject to problems, difficulties, obstacles, and hurdles that face all cultures. These are things that the PLC could and should be change to improve its effectiveness, thus improving student achievement. Andy Crouch explains that there is a rule that applies when we try to change culture. I call it the cultural rule.

Cultural Rule: “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

by tmfotki

There are 6 approaches or practices that are typically adopted to change culture. These practices are used by members within their PLCs to change the culture of the PLC for the better. However, 4 of the approaches are not necessarily the most effective way to change culture. As you will see, the first 4 approaches are lacking, while the last 2 approaches have the power to change culture for the better in our Professional Learning Communities.

1. Condemning Culture: “No matter how much we may protest--condemning the cultural goods on offer—unless we offer an alternative, the show will go on.”

Those who condemn the current practices of the PLC will do little to change it for the better. Pointing out that the PLC does not use data properly, or does not follow established PLC protocols is not going to change the culture.

To be sure, as Andy Crouch points out, “Some cultural artifacts can only be condemned.” Some practices within in a PLC rightly need to be pointed out if they are truly damaging to the students, the teachers, and the school. But it won’t change things

Condemning culture also leaves us open to being hypocrites. Be careful to condemn the culture of the PLC, because you might be contributing to it. Remember, it does nothing to improve the culture because it does not create or add anything new.

2. Critiquing Culture: “ To be sure, the best critics can change the framework in which creators are measured. But such analysis has lasting influence only when someone creates something new in the public realm.”

“Some cultural artifacts deserve to be critiqued.”

This may be the most natural approach for educators in Professional Learning Communities. It is very easy to critique, to point out what is wrong and what is not working. This is very natural for some. But it does nothing to change the culture.

Critiquing culture is passive. We are left waiting for culture to, “deliver us some new item to talk about.” When we critique we do not move the culture of the PLC forward. Critics are left waiting for others to create change.

3. Copying Culture: “…imitate it, replacing the offensive bits with more palatable ones.”

Copying culture has the advantage of finding cultural practices in other PLCs and copying those practices for the PLC to imitate. Not bad. Adopting the best practices of others is a smart and effective thing to do.

“Even the practice of copying cultural goods…has its place.”

But, copying too, is passive. We wait for culture to be created to copy. “In fast—changing cultural domains those whose posture is imitation will find themselves constantly slightly behind the times…”

When we wait for others to develop culture change in PLC practices that can be copied and adopted you eliminate the potential to create and shape the culture of your PLC to the specific needs of your team members, grade level, subject matter, school, and school district.

4. Consuming Culture: “…can very rarely consume their way into cultural change.”

“There are many cultural goods for which by far the most appropriate response is to consume.”

Just as copying culture can be effective sometimes, consuming cultural practices of other PLC can be a smart thing to do. But the same problem results.

Consuming culture is passive too. It assumes a posture of waiting. Letting someone else create the culture to be consumed and assuming that that culture is better than your own.

So if condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming culture are not desirable means to change the culture of a PLC, what is? Cultivation and Creation.

5. Cultivation: “All culture making requires a choice, conscious or unconscious, to take our place in a cultural tradition. We cannot make culture without culture. And this means creation begins with cultivation—taking care of the good things that culture has already handed on to us.”

“One who cultivates tries to create the most fertile conditions for good things to survive and thrive. Cultivating also requires weeding—sorting out what does and does not belong, what will bear fruit and what will choke it out.”

Being a good steward of the current PLC culture will allow the team to pick out what is working, affirm each other, and then weed out what isn’t working, making room for changes to take their place.

Cultivation is not passive. It works with what exists. It is purposeful. It affirms what has come before and makes way for what can come.

To often administrators make the mistake of not taking cultivation approach to their PLCs. Not everything is broken. Acknowledge the positive aspects of the current culture before you weed out the non-desirable practices.

6. Creators: “…people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful.”

Once non-desirable PLC practices have been weeded out, room will exist for the creator approach to change the culture with new practices, ideas, and approaches.

Approach 5 and 6 can be thought of in the spirit and mindset of a gardener and an artist.

The Artist and The Gardner

The Gardner: “The gardener looks carefully at the landscape; the existing plants, both flowers and weeds; the way the sun falls on the land.” 

“The gardener tends to what has gone before, making the most of what is beautiful and weeding out what is distracting or useless.”

The Artist: “The artist regards her subject, her canvas, her paints with care to discern what she can make with them.”

“The artist can be more daring: she starts with a blank canvas or a solid piece of stone and gradually brings something out of it that was never there before.”

The Key: “Indeed those who have cultivated and created are precisely the ones who have the legitimacy to condemn—whose denunciations, rare and carefully chosen, carry outsize weight. Cultivators and creators are the ones who are invited to critique and whose critiques are often the most telling and fruitful. Cultivators and creators can even copy without becoming mere imitators, drawing on the work of others yet extending it in new and exciting ways…”

“And when they consume, cultivators and creators do so without becoming mere consumers. They do not derive their identity from what they consume but what they create.”

To change the culture of a PLC the team must adhere to the Cultural Rule: To change culture you have to create culture. That is the only way. Allow the spirit of the gardener and the artist to allow your PLC to cultivate and create change in your PLCs culture, changes that will improve your PLC effectiveness and ultimately, your student’s performance.

Comments

[Andrew B. Watt]

I realized this yesterday. There's a bulletin board outside my classroom that has had the same tired display all through the winter. I gave it to my students as a project this week. They ripped down almost all of it, and began the process of reconstructing it yesterday. They have some guidelines, but really it's an opportunity to create something — to design something — visible to the whole school and to the world. And they get to put their names on it.

How will kids learn how to be graphic designers - how will they learn that they want to be graphic designers? - unless we give them the chance to play with layout, image selection, typography, sizing, major and minor headers, and so on... in some environment other than a standard research paper?

I think I have to put together a similar set of guidelines for podcasts, for movies, and for several other styles of presenting information.

[Rob Jacobs]

Andrew, I agree. The project let students change the cultural artifact of the bulletin board by creating a different cultural artifact.

It is the opportunity to cultivate and create that will create change.

[brazen teacher]

Who writes this blog, and where have you been all my life? I love this place... Thanks for making me think every time I visit.

[Rob Jacobs]

Who writes this blog? I do. Who else would write it? ;-0

[brazen teacher]

Teachers know that stupid questions get stupid answers, but couldn't you have humored me a tad... I did give you a big compliment. lol.