How to Build an Intentional School Culture | A Conversation With Joel Abel

Every school has a culture whether you shape it intentionally or not and today we're going to be exploring why being intentional about culture matters and how to actually make it happen. Hey everyone I'm Shane Leaning welcome to Global Ed Leaders the chat-topping leadership podcast for international schools. I'm an organizational coach and in this show I get to know the teachers, leaders and innovators making a difference in education across the world. Today's episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association and the University of Warwick's Center for Teacher Development. Stay tuned to

learn more. So my guest today is Joel Abel. Joel has spent many years in international education working across China and Germany as a teacher, leader and most recently a consultant. His mission is to refocus education on supporting teachers which is what he sees as the key to solving most of our challenges in education. This led up to inspiring his book Teacher First

Management which is a practical handbook for education leaders and we discussed a whole host of things including school culture which I found particularly fascinating so let's jump in. When you're looking to create a culture or looking to have like a specified culture in your school I think in one degree or another everyone's going to try to create a culture whether that's intentional or not. Everyone has a feeling about how a workplace should work and what it should feel like and every individual is going to try to affect their surroundings to make it equalize with whatever their bias is and if it's not that then they're going to become resentful that it's not what they expected it to be or they're gonna become tired or worn out by having to fight against it on a regular basis so that's kind of why intentionality is really important because if you're not building towards something you're letting every other stakeholder in effect do their own work alone unsupported to make that culture happen and if they're gonna clash and it's going to be a more difficult situation than not. A few places get lucky people come in already aligned and it just happens but that is not something as a leader I don't think anyone should be banking on in a professional setting. I like how you

frame that it's bringing to mind for me the work of Vivian Robinson who talks about theories of action that everyone has their own theory of action of how things will play out or how things are gonna go and that means that in a school I guess you've got countless different people and you know different stakeholders with different theories of action of how things could be done or you might say they're all mini cultures right that are happening so what you're saying is I guess you can't just let culture happen there has to be some intentionality in your direction right? Yeah absolutely whether you define our culture or not it's going to happen and so it's going to be good or it's going to be bad but that's something unless you take control of you're not going to have any input on so you know I think it comes back to one of the most important things when you are defining culture is this idea of values and how culture is the visible reflection of values in a particular place so if you have a culture where people are not being supportive of each other or you know focused only on the time that they can get off or focused only on a particular set of values that you don't hold then that's what's going to be felt whether you profess to have a different set of values or not the culture is going to be the reflection of that at the end of the day. So when you're working with a school or when you're thinking about culture is that where you start with values is that the first place to start thinking about? I think it's the biggest test in terms of whether or not a culture has been aligned or has been intentionally created is if it is in fact reflecting the values now in terms of if I'm going to rebuild that or I'm going to take steps that's probably not the first step I'm going to take in terms of starting the rebuilding but I think the evaluation part to see whether or not that action does need to be taken that's the first step is your culture matching on the day-to-day sort of performance of your individuals the values that you profess to have and that you want everybody to have and then from there if we get yes or we get no then we can start the real work of aligning towards those values and intentional cultural building. It's funny that isn't it because I wonder how many

leaders you know have got value statements in their schools they have these values written down somewhere but how often do you check in and how often are you checking in to see whether these values actually match the culture of the place or whether you're actually just letting culture evolve from somewhere else not guided intentionally by the values. Yeah I've seen it so many times you know I describe myself very often as someone who deeply wants to believe in what I'm doing and deeply believes in when people say that they have these particular values especially when I'm walking into a situation as someone who's in charge or supporting or consulting on the organization one of the things I always want to do is start with a value-based system and then apply those values to everything that we're doing you know at the beginning of every meeting we should be reflecting on how are the values reflected in what's happened to this point and how they're going to reflect in the things we're going to be doing you know that's not the whole thing you know that's not the structure that needs to be built but that's the foundation that it needs to be built on absolutely. Yeah that makes a lot of sense to me Joel I've got your book in front of me teach first management and I mean it's got so much in it for one buck like it's literally a you know a handbook for a leader you know you can really kind of flick to lots of different places one of the bits that we're talking about now is culture in here you talk quite usefully about a culture feedback loop which I found very interesting would you be able to talk a little bit through how that culture feedback loop looks like and how it works yeah so this is an amalgamation of different ideas that I've been presented in the past and because I tend to gravitate towards simplicity and structure in order to keep everything in my head at the same time this is a structure that I put together that really made sense to me so the culture feedback loop starts with what every leader wants to see which is the results and the results are created by the actions that's key stakeholders namely and you know if we're talking the context of the book I wrote the teachers you know what are the actions are the teachers taking are they being supportive are they showing up on time are they taking extra time or really caring about students and that in terms of culture is about as far as most leaders and most organizational plans will go it's like okay tell people to do these actions so we can create these results right yeah so like a small example would be I went to one of these schools that I was overseeing one time and we wanted experienced teachers to share lesson plans with new teachers to give them a template to work from and that was kind of like the plan a simple way to sort of help new teachers get you know a little bit of a toehold and the teachers were really insulted by that notion the experienced teachers were they're like you know why would we hand our work that we've put work into to help someone who hasn't put in the hours or put in the shift yet to have earned this kind of help right so that's as far as it goes and just ordering that could have been something that we could have done but the truth about these actions is that that's not really where these results are coming from and these actions are being underpinned and being driven by a set of beliefs so you know we've got the results on top and then we've got the actions that create those results and underpinning that is the beliefs that those individual stakeholders hold and this is what is truly important to understand about culture is that it is driven in terms of the actual stakeholders the teachers on the ground by the beliefs that they hold so of course the beliefs were clear in this example that they believed that their work was their own basically their own copyright or their own ip you know something they had put a lot of work in and that if other teachers were stealing quote unquote this work that that was unfair or that they were getting work done for them an advantage they had never received personally that's really useful framing jola the example you use is great for me because i've also come across this exact example a few times in schools i've worked with where teachers have felt aggrieved of using their work for other purposes and you're right if you kept it at the action level you as a leader therefore i mean immediately you're going to be deeply frustrated aren't you it's going to come across as an act of defiance or something like that and the action is not being done but actually if you're thinking about culture what you're saying from my understanding is there's a belief behind that and i guess your step as a leader is to kind of look at that belief because maybe that's a belief system that's become part of the culture at the school as well many teachers might feel that way well yeah and you know that belief system is really strong it's incredibly tough and resilient and if you try to attack that belief structure directly then that is the first shot of an us versus them culture in a school leadership versus teachers administration versus educators i believe truly this is how those dynamics start in those cases so you know according to this model we're in a place where we cannot just order actions because we know we have the beliefs and according to this model as well you can't just attack the beliefs or just disregard them now you could show empathy in terms of understanding their beliefs showing that you recognize their beliefs but then order the actions anyway now that might score a few points but really all you're going to get at the end of the day there is just sort of a begrudging acceptance that well work sucks everywhere and i guess even if i don't believe in this i've got to do it because that's what i'm contracted to do so you know you might still get some of the same results that you're looking for but it will always be half-hearted and it won't really change culture you will just still get a compliance workforce that is doing what you want in spite of the culture you haven't actually changed anything so i like your framing on how you created that experience that new experience for those teachers in your example that to help reframing it's got me thinking about i guess there's many different experiences then you can help create that might influence some of their beliefs like could it also be like in that example modeling sharing for example like being more transparent in sharing things from leadership maybe or maybe there's other things other experiences you could do to start to shape and to show teachers that maybe transparency is okay in other areas of the school and hopefully those experiences start to shape beliefs which might then inform their actions on sharing i guess is the idea well yeah i think that there are as many experience solutions as there are desired outcomes you know there's many ways that we could have done it i would say that there's two points to be made with what you just said one is that i do believe these experiences as much as modeling is i think an extremely important thing these experiences do need to touch them in some way the people that you're trying to impact people are very good at setting up sort of tribal boundaries and especially in cultures that are in need of attention there tend to be a lot of them so being able to say oh well this school did it or you know in the senior leadership team this is how we do it you know that can very quickly activate a bit of a tribal response that says well you know that's all well good for them but we're down here with our own issues and our own problems you know so i think finding ways in which those experiences can touch them but also to the same point that you made there once you create an experience like the example i just gave out the feedback loop that you can create with the results and the actions that then happen so these new teachers now are getting these packs of gold plans and they're then going to the teachers who provided those plans and are you know really saying thank you so much for thank you for helping me like understand this better do you have any more tips is there something that i'm doing wrong with this because i'm trying to use your plan and it doesn't seem to be working out and that sort of feedback loop that you can create that sort of virtuous cycle of you know positive feedback that also then becomes an experience through the results so you create an experience you change the belief just a little bit you created new action that created a result now that results coming around and being an experience in and of itself to create a positive feedback cycle for these culture efforts that you're trying to make so to your question those two points i think are extremely important yeah well i think the good thing about this is that it's almost like knocking dominoes a little bit like you can trigger some experiences which can help perpetuate a culture long into the future by new actions new results that are then feeding back into the belief system right yeah it's momentum it is difficult to begin momentum but once you gain up enough speed it's also very hard to stop yeah thanks joel this is fascinating to me a lot of the work i do is with schools around organizational development and your models really helped some framing in my mind i wonder like sitting this within the wider then if we kind of zoom out a little bit to that kind of wider sense of community in a school that wider sense of even belonging in a school something you talk to in your book in an international school that can be a particular minefield for people people can feel that creating a sense of community belonging in a context as diverse as an international school is difficult and can lead to challenges with creating culture as we've just been discussing do you have any ideas on how we might be able to build that effective community in this kind of context well i think you put out two terms there that i think carry a lot of water community and diversity and you know we throw those around and i'm not saying that you just carelessly throw those around but a lot of those are held in very different levels of esteem and in very different definitions in different places i think that if you want to define community as a system of mutual support for the mutual and individual goals that we have then we need to make sure that a few things are true that you know we have a system that's set up to allow resources and space to support you know and be given and received within a team so you know if you want to create community then there needs to be space for that community to be had and that a community wholly understands it is bought into the goals of that team when we're talking about setting goals and desired reactions like that idea of creating a plan that does everything we just talked about if you don't have input by the larger community as a whole it's going to be very difficult for you to bind that together as a community effort i think that those really important and that those experiences are laid out in pursuit of the mutually set goals and in a way are mutually reinforced and supported by everyone from you know the top going down and from the bottom going up as well you know so when we're talking about and i talk about in the book like if you want to make sure that that's the case across an entire community a model like Maslow's really helps to create those experiences but i also want to touch on this idea of diversity because if you look at my bio my entire working life has been spent abroad in diverse and expat communities and i think that that idea of diversity is a pretty loaded word i will often use it to refer to nationality but there's a huge amount of diversity in generational divides one thing i have learned getting to know a lot of british people and marrying a british person is that this idea of class can have a very strong impact in people's self-identity and how they might form different tribes and in being an international school like there's also diversity in experience you probably know as well as i do that there's a very big difference between a long-term expat who's been around for a while and someone who's coming over for their first year abroad so you want to be able to know what kind of diversity you're targeting and also how you're using it to your advantage when you're looking at how can we create unifying cultures and cultures that affects in the way that we want them to the rest of our stakeholders you know especially our students especially our community at large so there are specific measurable differences in national culture i would really point to erin meyers excellent book the culture man when i was creating intercultural communication workshops for previous companies a lot of the training was based on her work but yeah we can shortcut some of these issues i mean not ignore them but we can shortcut some of these issues by focusing on currencies and personal goals because you know if we look at groups in terms of what defines them in terms of tribal affect then you know it can miss the actual motivations that are driving individuals and by focusing on being able to group those people together by putting in the work in one-on-ones and in conversations and try to you know connect with people in a real way then we can start to see where those individual experiences may be provided that will really get them on board regardless of whether they're tribally allocated themselves or have been excluded or included into a group based on a certain measure of diversity to be honest though there's also this idea about diversity that i think that we don't see in terms of the benefits in our international schools specifically we actually have some common binders in a lot of cases that i think are incredibly useful to leverage in these efforts so like everyone that works in these international schools a lot of people tend to be either expats or you know internationally minded they decided to work in an international sphere and whether that means they leave their home or whether that means they leave home and drive to work every day to work in a language they didn't grow up in they are very internationally minded they have somewhat similar income levels everyone's built a career in education has those goals so you can look at diversity in terms of what sort of splitting people up into different teams or different tribes and that can be leveraged for experiences that you provide but you also need to look at the individual side of what experiences need to be leveraged by individual currencies individual values and then look for those opportunities to leverage everybody on the commonalities that they have this episode is supported by the international curriculum association the ica have been around for about 30 years now championing quality unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools and what i really love is that right at their core is the model for improving learning this is a model focused on the learning experience and they have tons of great curriculum materials pd resources and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours if you're interested head over to internationalcurriculum.com you know recruiting and developing great teachers is one of the biggest challenges we face in international schools that's why i'm excited about the university of warwick center for teacher education their qts and pgcei with qts programs are specifically designed for international schools combining online learning with hands-on classroom experience check out the link in the show notes to learn more how they develop teachers in your school we can in international schools talk about diversity in the schools as a challenge but it's an additional challenge like it's like we're a school and we've got this additional thing we have to deal with and that's true to many extents there are challenges in diversity but there are also things that connect that group of people coming together and i think that international mindfulness is kind of good and maybe that's the place you start when you're looking at community building looking at what connects everyone and potentially those activities you can build around that well absolutely if i'm sitting in a school and i'm sitting next to a canyon and a german we're all come from very different cultures but the three of us have this commonality that we all decided to leave our home and come live and work here and that's what expat communities have built on and i'm not saying that that needs to be a requirement that you need to have something like that that is all the case but being able to leverage those factors is definitely helpful and definitely gives you that leverage to start looking for ways in which you can design your experiences towards the desired beliefs and outcomes that you want is looking for where we have these connections and webs that can be leveraged if we can build on that a little bit jol this is really interesting i'm loving this conversation so we've talked about belief systems like that being so important for culture so teachers beliefs teachers feeling belonging or a sense of community in their school now what about teachers finding meaning in their work like what about them actually helping teachers who are coming into our schools to actually get that kind of sense of meaning or i guess on the maslow self-actualization do you have any thoughts around helping teachers find meaning in their work i mean the reason i do advocate so strongly and what i wrote my book around was this teacher first approach or i mean i think what you refer to as a staff focused approach yes is that if we look at a student focused approach then you can only allow them to find meaning in one way and the only teacher whose meaning is going to be validated are the ones who get meaning from the interactions that they have with their students yeah you know that's what a student focused approach looks like and that's the only room that it gives in a school and so when you have teachers that might be motivated and this might seem strange for people who haven't worked in a lot of schools or haven't worked in schools for very long the idea that teachers can have motivations other than the students is something that managers need to be aware of and need to be accepting of i personally was you know a teacher i would not call myself a teacher by trade i have taught in my past in the early parts of my career and as much as i did want to see my students succeed and as much as i still have extremely fond memories of watching them succeed and building relationships with some of them it wasn't the thing that drove me professionally and it wasn't the thing that motivated me to keep coming in and doing a better job every day i like systems that work i like cultures and administrative constructs that make everybody better i like seeing a teacher who is admittedly so much better than i am get the support that they want that's what drives me every day that's what's driven my whole 17 year career in education so being open as a manager as a leader as a policymaker to the idea that there are going to be currencies and by currencies i've used that several times now and i want to make sure we define that correctly currencies are the things that people find valuable in their work that they get back from their work so for someone like my wife who is an incredible teacher and whose calling is actually teaching the joy that she gets from the connection to her students and seeing those students thrive and build skill and become these young adults and then confident people that's her currency it drives her and it's awe inspiring to watch her do it but to someone like me be going in and fixing a particular incentive model that actually makes teachers want to show up and do a better job or that gets out of the way helping teachers do what they want to do i think that is a currency that could be recognized even if someone is a teacher and not an administrator so i think you need to be able to connect with people individually accept the broad range of ways that people find meaning and then help drive experiences that make them feel that that meaning can be expressed while maintaining standards and i think you'll find that standards are much easier to maintain when people are engaged with the work that they're doing on their own terms yes joel this is another brilliant reflection that is again it's just really getting me thinking you're so right i think you know i would almost take it further i think it's dangerous to adopt a mentality to say that all of our teachers must be number one motivated by success of their students i think that it's very dangerous and it ignores our human nature that's not to say that a teacher obviously shouldn't care of course they must care about the outcomes of their students but we are all driven in different ways and i know for me for example when i was teaching english traditional language in international schools i was of course serving a population that i felt passionately about that needed serving but i was also intensely motivated by my own learning about the subject knowledge and by my development i was also motivated by my leadership of the department and learning how to navigate those situations and there was definitely motivators that were making me show up every day with a vigor not all of them just being gosh i just think these students are just wonderful and deserve my full energy and it you can come across a little bit righteous right you know it's all about the students but i would also say in addition to that not being realistic it's also damaging in that when you just focus all of your attention on the students the staff comes second and when your staff start to come second are they really going to be able to give everything you need them to give to those students it's questionable yeah i think it's the root to be honest of so many of the difficulties we have and many of the teaching programs and industries around the world is this idea this you know sort of gamocles that can be held over everybody's head and you know saying like well if you're not focusing on the students then you shouldn't be here or you're not right to be a teacher or you have nothing to contribute when in fact there's so many different skills and like i said currencies but focuses and passions that people have in terms of education that are not 100 student focused when someone comes to meet with that idea like i'd like to turn it around to them like you know say well are students really well served by a teacher who doesn't focus on their administrative work and i said well no we need the administrative work because this needs to work in this so you're saying that if they don't a hundred percent focus on their administrative work if that isn't their passion that they don't deserve to be a teacher as well like this idea that there is one particular passion or one facet of education that if you don't wholly focus your passions to that you failed or you aren't right for this industry i think is what really holds back many departments schools districts etc the whole countries in the book that i wrote i really did focus on making sure it is a guide for first-time teachers but it's a guide written in a way to help new managers learn to manage in this teacher focused way and that's again the passion i had as an educator and that's where i hope i can contribute to the success of students across the world by honing in and delivering on my passions and my skills my innate sort of interests well i'm so glad that you were able to follow your interests and your passions and follow your meaning job because it's resulted in a book that's full of practical ideas it's one of those books that you can go back to and pick up at different points depending on what you're working on that it's not just a one and done one and done book so i appreciate you contributing and putting this out there you know we've talked a lot about culture and teacher belief systems today is there anything else that we haven't covered today that you'd like to draw attention to i would say that you know i'm big on my tools and i'm really big on using these models to sort of understand because i'm a very visual person and so when it comes to this idea of culture building certainly pick up the book because i think the model i lay out it's impactful but it's simple and it's direct it's not easy to do that work but it is at least a structure that i think most people can grab onto but also that it's a moving target all the time you know if you look at another model that i love to use and love to train on tuckman's models of the different stages of team formation those ideas of like when has this team been formed and how far along are they how well do they know each other all those things are going to impact how you do this work so as much as i'm an big advocate for this structure as a way to build your internal culture with intention i think you can't be afraid of taking a crack at it being wrong and then taking a crack at it being right and then a month later a year later two years later like having the same thing you did be wrong even though it was right before because every school every team every organization goes through cycles so this is the constant work that every manager needs to do of continuing to aim at this moving target and just like all people your own skills will develop and your own approaches will change so i guess that sounds scary but it's meant to be a word of encouragement to everyone saying that even if you don't feel like you've been particularly successful now continuing to hone your skills and work on hitting that target every day is the measure i think of a really good manager and one that is in the proper place to care for the teachers in their team this conversation which all really helped me frame thinking around school culture i love that culture feedback loop connecting results actions and belief it's such a practical way for us to think about culture i also really loved our discussion on diversity in schools not just as a challenge but actually about how our shared experiences as a community can actually be a strength and particularly those insights about allowing teachers to find different sources of meaning in their work not just student outcomes i think that's a message every school leader needs to hear as joel said when we support teachers to engage with work on their own terms actually maintaining high standards can be that much easier you can find more about joel and his work at teacherfirstmanagement.com global leaders is hosted by me

shane leaning huge thanks to my show editor pete mcgill and for the original music by guilleme silver thank you so so much for tuning in today and as ever if we don't speak before i'll see you here next week if you're interested in the work of my show's partners the university of warrick and the international curriculum association head to the show notes to get links to learn more