Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division, Feb/2009

Busy administrators will appreciate this quick read packed with immediate, accessible strategies. This book provides the framework for understanding dynamic relationships within a school culture and ensuring a positive environment that supports the changes necessary to improve learning for all students. The author explores many aspects of human behavior, social conditions, and history to reveal best practices for building healthy school cultures.

1. Learn how leaders can overcome staff division to improve relationships and transform toxic cultures into healthy ones.
2. Examine educators motivations for hanging on to paradigms that are contrary to those articulated by their school or district.
3. Understand the underlying tensions that impact school culture among four different groups of educators: Believers, Fundamentalists, Tweeners, and Survivors.
4. Attain specific strategies for working with each group of educators to transform school culture.
5. Create positive environments in which staff not only tolerate change, but also seek and embrace the changes that maximize organizational effectiveness.

About The Author:
Anthony Muhammad, PhD, is one of the most sought-after educational consultants in North America. As a practitioner for nearly 20 years, Dr. Muhammad has served as a middle school teacher, an assistant principal, a middle school principal, and a high school principal. His tenure as a practitioner has earned him several awards as both a teacher and a principal. His most notable accomplishment came as principal at Levey Middle School in Southfield, Michigan, a National School of Excellence, where student proficiency on state assessments more than doubled in five years. Muhammad and the staff at Levey used the Professional Learning Communities at Work model of school improvement, and the school has been recognized in several videos and articles as a model high-performing PLC. As a researcher, Dr. Muhammad has published articles in several publications in both the United States and Canada. He is a contributing author to The Collaborative Administrator: Working Together as a Professional Learning Community (2008).