Committing To The Culture: How Leaders Can Create And Sustain Positive Schools, June 2019

In their follow-up to School Culture Recharged and the best-selling School Culture Rewired, Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker go deep into the roots of culture change and explore how school leaders can positively shift their cultures in a sustainable way. 

Drawing from the authors' extensive experience and research, Committing to the Culture

1. Unpacks questions around the nature of culture, including the importance of vision and climate and how the tension between the past and the future can keep a culture stagnant.
2. Explains how toxic cultures come about, why they can be so resistant to lasting change, and how not to change those cultures.
3. Describes how to build a positive culture based on trust, collaboration, and commitment rather than fear, competition, and compliance.
4. Offers advice to help leaders ensure that positive change endures, withstanding fads, toxic mindsets, and other threats.

The authors provide real-world scenarios to illustrate how their ideas and approaches work in practice. Leaders will gain profound insight into how to create meaningful change, with the goal not just to "transform" their school but also to get all members of the school community to commit to culture change--and make sure that change sticks.

About the Authors:

Steve Gruenert is a professor at Indiana State University. He has studied organizational culture and climate for more than 20 years and continues to learn and collaborate with other researchers as these concepts evolve. He is coauthor, with Todd Whitaker, of School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It (ASCD) and School Culture Recharged: Strategies to Energize Your Staff and Culture (ASCD), and, with Ryan Donlan, of Minds Unleashed: How Principals Can Lead the Right-Brained Way (Rowman & Littlefield). He and his wife, Emily, have three daughters: Jennifer, Mackenzi, and Madison.

Todd Whitaker is fortunate to have been able to blend his passion with his career. He is a leading presenter in the field of education and a professor of educational leadership at the University of Missouri and professor emeritus at Indiana State University. He has previously served as both a teacher and a principal and is the author of over 40 books, including What Great Teachers Do Differently, Your First Year, and Shifting the Monkey, along with the books he has coauthored with Steve Gruenert. Whitaker and his wife, Beth, have three children: Katherine, Madeline, and Harrison.