Life and Environment; And Schools

I have been serving as principal of a middle school considered high risk in all categories for the past 12 years.  Over the course of this time,  have been thinking about the oneness of life and environment in relationship to the type of culture we create at schools and how it influences our students.  This became even more of a focus as we experienced the trauma of repeated wildfires in Northern California, and  the tremendous upheaval of the pandemic.  A 13th century Japanese sage, Nichiren Daishonin,  said it very poetically:

 " The ten directions are 'the environment' and living beings are 'life'.  To illustrate, environment is like the shadow and life, the body.  Without the body, no shadow can exist, and without life, no environment.  In the same way, life is shaped by its environment"1

Simply put, people end up living to some degree in an environment that matches their state of life, while the environment also, to some degree, shapes that state.  This relationship gets very personal, say, within a family, and then more general as members of a community, nation, etc.  The "environment" and "life" in Santa Rosa, CA compared with Bangkok, obviously reflects different sensibilities.  In the same way, neighborhood schools evolve and change based on the people living within them. Life and an environment is not a static thing:  they are both growing, mutually influencing and subject to similar energy states and levels.  The energy of an environment can be elevated or brought down based on the thoughts, words and deeds of the lives that inhabit it.  

Of course, this is a very subtle thing.  However, I think we can all say that we can get a sense of an environment by being in it.  Everything within that environment - the decor, the architecture, the light - all reflect how the people in it feel.  And, as school managers, we are very attune with our environment and charged with the mission to turn it into an affirming, nurturing space that focuses on the higher conditions of life such as learning, self-realizing, and empathy for others.

School administrators tend to be more mobile than their staff, so they will end up taking a position in a school with a very delineated culture and environmental "feel".  I know I did.  Part of the reason  I applied for the principal position at my current school was that I was familiar with the culture and saw that it was basically healthy.  Having been there in past years as their literacy coach, and then working with the school when I was a staff developer for my district, gave me a clear understanding of the passion, flexibility and drive the staff demonstrates consistently.

However, even with the healthiest of cultures, there are still times when it is put to the test.  This usually occurs when policy directions shift, moving us out of our comfort zone.  I had a school that had adapted to Program Improvement under NCLB:  they had functioning PLCs, collaborated regularly, were data driven and worked hard to bring out student's potential.  With the shift to Common Core State Standards, and our district's shift to restorative discipline practices, the staff began to struggle as a whole in making these changes.

It was with this in mind  that the above quote came into my environment.  I then remembered the book by Anthony Muhammad that I had been putting off reading:  "Transforming School Culture."
In it he talks about the hidden culture in a school that despite the best efforts of the management team, holds sway when big changes are in the wind.    Then, our relationships with key staff members will be important to move the environment forward.  We were able to do that over the nine years that I had been principal prior to the COVID pandemic.  We moved the school into a more 21st century collaborative culture and to a person, our staff became literate in the googleverse:  changing and adapting to bring online resources into their tried and true practices.  I was able to identify my "Believers", as Muhammad states, the teachers who were "composed of seasoned educators....who had made a decision to accept a student-centered paradigm as their primary mode of operations." pg 31.  They became my department chairs, union site reps and confidents.  They helped move student-centered, common sense strategies and activities forward among the other groups, "the tweeners", those new to our culture, "the survivors" (very few at my site and mostly moved on to retirement or less at risk schools, and "the fundamentalists" on whom we had to have a coordinated strategy to prevent them from bogging down meaningful change.  We considered these teammates as our happy challenge: to bring them into the fold, to help them move onto a more suitable environment for them and to keep us in check.   In order to move them, we had to consistently keep to the high road and embody the qualities we wanted in our students:  the ability to listen, to be flexibile, to free our creativity and our ability to engage in meaningful dialoge.

Through this 

1.  Nichiren Daishonin, a Buddhist monk,  in a letter written to his disciples, "On Omens"