Skip to main content

"Culture Beats Strategy"

I subscribed to Seth Godin's short blog posts recently because my boss shared Godin's writing with me. He's worth listening to on the Tim Ferris Show, too.

Two days ago, he shared a post that ended with this:

Culture beats strategy. So much that culture is strategy.

When I think about our work with students, culture really is the most important work that we can do. 

Is there a culture of trust and collaboration in our classrooms and with our colleagues? Or is the culture that we have created one of competition and negativity? 

We can't begin to take risks with our students and co-workers if we don't trust each other. And it's in that space of trust where we can really be willing to try something new. 

I'm also thinking a lot about the days where I seemed to focus more on the "strategy" of teaching rather than tapping into the culture in my classroom. Even when I think the culture is established to the point where we don't need to spend any more time developing it, I am reminded that it is through the culture that I can accomplish great work with kids. But my classroom will never have a strong culture if I don't take the necessary steps to develop a cohesive and supportive one. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo

Past Secretaries of Education

After last night's hearing with nominee DeVos, I decided to research past education secretaries. Senator Alexander talked a lot about "precedent" when it came to procedures regarding the HELP Committee. Let us remember that the first education secretary was appointed in 1979. That's the same year that Congress created the department under Jimmy Carter. This is also the same department that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish. Even the first education secretary had experience in government. Shirley M. Hufstedler was both a federal and state appeals court judge. I'm going to say that because of that experience, she's probably familiar with law and how laws work. As we saw last night, when Betsy DeVos was redirected a question because her answer implied that states could choose to implement federal law or not, she might need a refresher. Then we had Terrel Bell, who was a high school teacher, bus driver, and served in the Marines. Again, a long list of public