Redefining Teachers, Reculturing Schools: Connections, Commitments and Challenges

Abstract

While strategies of school restructuring @en attend to the governance and descision-making, timetabling and programming aspects of school l~ as a lever for change, school reculturing buries deep into the heart of human attitudes and relationships that hoM the school together and move it forward (or fail to do so), Drawing on four school case studies, Lynne Miller describes how successful school reculturing involves schools and their staff moving towards building professional community, putting learning before teaching, engaging in inquiry as a guide to improvement, developing their own systems of accountability and standards of learning , taking a whole-school focus, and widening the responsibilities for leadership. Reculturing, Miller shows, is no easy matter. It depends on committing to long time frames, on the support of excellent principals, on teachers who are prepared to become leaders of their colleagues as well as teachers of their classes, on access to supportive networks outside the school and so on. This chapter describes not only the theory and principles of reculturing, but conveys a vivid sense of what it means to try and recu#ure one ~ school in particular cases. School reform has as many meanings as it has forms and strategies. To limit the scope of this chapter, I use the terms reforming schools and restructuring schools interchangeably to refer to those schools that are striving for changes in how learning is conceptualized and how it occurs. These changes are not a matter of rearranging the furniture; they require a major redesign of the environment. Too often, schools with new bell schedules, multi-age classes, grade level teams, and integrated curriculum units continue to construct learning from taken-for-granted and unex-amined assumptions. Linda Darling-Hammond (1990) terms these "superficial reforms" and sees them as short-lived and ineffective. On the other hand, what Darling-Hammond calls "structural reforms" occur in schools where learning proceeds from a new set of premises. To be more specific, in reforming schools, learning engages children and young adults in rigorous academic work that encourages them to "use their minds well" (Sizer, 1984) and to make connections between ideas and their applications in the world beyond the school. Ultimately, such a conception of learning depends on teachers-not on schedules, grouping procedures, or policy manuals. It is teachers who provide the support and challenge that promote learning; it is teachers who encourage improvement through the feedback they provide; it is teachers who present materials and ideas that engage student interest; and it is teachers who safeguard the academic integrity of the work that gets done in school. Teachers in 249