Dr. Anthony Muhammad: Transforming School Culture

Transforming School Culture Essay

School culture is created by the educators that work within the school. In the book, Transforming School Culture, Dr. Anthony Muhammad, has focused on 4 groups noted throughout schools including the fundamentalist, believers, tweeners, and survivors (Muhammad, p. xiv). In this essay, we will focus on some of these educational groups identified by Dr. Muhammad such as leveraging the believers, supporting the tweeners, and transitioning the fundamentalist, while also taking a closer look specifically at the culture of the school I work in and how I as a leader can promote change in the school. Beginning with the educational group the believers, this is a group “committed to the learning of each student and operate under

Pamela Cronin shares that Sheyenne falls strong toward believers, with a few tweeners, and 1-2 fundamentalists. She does not see the fundamentalists as de-railers or negative, but rather voices that keep the rest of the group continually thinking through the process. Overall, she sees Sheyenne culture as “Awesome,” as a group that is always looking to grow and change. (Dr. Pamela Cronin, Personal Communications, October 16, 2017). One area she feels the school could improve school culture are with celebrations. Sometimes Sheyenne takes celebrations for granted because things generally go well. This year the school is working to improve cohesiveness and celebrations by planning some to promote this. Since the believers are a large group within Sheyenne the administration push to keep their voices strong. They encourage teachers to continually try new things, to step out of the box and trial ideas they have. The number of tweeners in the school is small if any. Dr. Cronin sees most people as believers including many veteran staff (Dr. Pamela Cronin, Personal Communications, October 16th, 2017). Sheyenne is looking to become more innovative, and that can be made possible with strong voices of the