I’ve been job hunting for several months (thank you, layoffs). As I’m eyeing job postings and prepping for interviews, I’ve been interested in how organizations describe their culture.

Not one of them leads with “hot mess," "toxic swamp of despair" or “dumpster fire,” though many orgs are.

Over the years and especially during my time as a consultant, I’ve seen a lot. The CEO who announced “Aaaaaaand… youshouldknowlayoffsarecoming” in the middle of a wonderful holiday party at the Birchmere. (Yassss she did. I like to think it inspired the lyric “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”) I’ve seen management so loathe to make hard, emotional decisions that the org literally ran out of money. I’ve counseled staff members who’ve given up sharing their ideas because they’re never acknowledged or adopted.

Culture does eat strategy for breakfast. I love a good strategic plan and I’ve written several, but strategy is just a bunch of words on paper without good people to bring it to life.

Strategic plans usually include “mission,” “vision” and “values.” Organizational culture should be a tangible embodiment of those values.

Companies with healthy culture develop better strategies, because employees contribute their expertise to sharpen them.

Companies with healthy culture execute on strategy more effectively, because employees feel invested in the work and have the support they need to be successful.

Where’s the best place you’ve ever worked? How would you describe its culture?

For me, it’s been those places where I have been:

1. Recognized for my hard work
2. Comfortable admitting what I don’t know (yet), asking for help, and getting it
3. Invited into shared problem solving and decision making
4. Respected as a professional with valuable knowledge and experiences to share
5. Encouraged to keep learning and to try new things
6. Expected to be responsible for getting core things done well, and held accountable when they’re not
7. Seen as a whole person (with a life outside of work), known, and cared about by my colleagues
8. Part of a community of people who genuinely enjoy each other.

School divisions, schools, and classrooms have cultures, too, just like any other organization. As APS rolls up its sleeves to start on a new strategic plan, I believe that it’s our culture, more than any particular verbiage we craft, that will propel us to a great future.

Here are some examples I really admire from other schools and districts I’ve visited.

Time to collaborate at P.S. 172, Brooklyn, NY:

At P.S. 172 staff members have regular, protected time to collaborate and make decisions about the curriculum and their own professional learning. The NYC Department of Education granted the school a waiver so that it could schedule a 90-minute block of professional learning time at the start of each school day, one day per grade level. (School leaders developed a master schedule that places students in specials while their classroom teachers are engaged in these professional learning sessions.)

Grade-level teams work with instructional coaches to identify topics and formats for their own professional learning; Rachel, one of the school’s special education teachers, shared, “There is great respect here for the amount of time teachers need to spend together. We respect each other as colleagues and are able to ask for what we need.”

Teams use separate dedicated time to co-create the school’s curriculum and revise it annually to meet student needs. “It’s a shared document that everyone is responsible for,” said Rachel. “If something isn’t working, there’s not one person who feels their work is being criticized. It was made by all of us.”

Student decision making at Parker Charter Essential School, Devens, MA:

At Parker, students are surveyed as part of mid-year and end-of-year teacher evaluations, and a student-led Community Congress has a voice in changing school policies, providing feedback on the school’s annual budget allocations, and weighing in on other administrative issues. Additionally, the student-led Justice Committee plays a key role in resolving conflicts, providing mediation, and developing restorative plans after infractions.

The corollary to shared decision making is shared responsibility and accountability. Parker principal Todd Sumner told us, “There’s an expectation that adults in school share a commitment to the entire school. When we orient new staff, we share that it means you can’t walk by stuff… if I walk by I can’t say ‘They’re not my problem because they’re not my students.’ You need to step toward the issue, not away from it. Because this piece is consistent over time, the longer the students are here, the more they own it. The juniors and seniors really are the ones doing most of the tone-setting. They will be as quick as any adult to say, ‘This doesn’t look right.’”


Valuing teacher expertise at Harvest Collegiate High School, New York, NY:

At Harvest Collegiate, teachers can get release time to pursue career development opportunities and take graduate classes towards advanced degrees. Many teachers take on hybrid roles within the school, including professional learning community leaders, health and wellness leaders and curriculum developers.

At Harvest, all teacher desks are housed together in one big workroom so that teachers can troubleshoot issues and share ideas. This workroom is often where individual teachers create new courses and solicit feedback on those course ideas from their colleagues; teachers at the school develop courses that reflect their passions and expertise as well as interests voiced by their students.

Faculty member Steve Lazar noted, “We ask teachers, ‘What's the most successful unit you've ever taught?’ and then we say, ‘Great, make that a course. Turn that into a semester class.’ Because we're building on teachers’ strengths and past experiences, that leads to teachers doing things that work for students.”

Interdisciplinary inquiry and innovation at Vancouver iTech, Vancouver, WA:

Teachers across several subject areas teamed up to try out an interdisciplinary experience for high school students at Vancouver iTech. First, the students studied The Omnivore's Dilemma as a collaborative biology, health and physical education unit. They tracked their eating and sleeping habits and interviewed their parents on the factors that influence healthy behaviors.

In their media class, students then created short films about food for a festival they planned. The inspiration for each film was a nutritional improvement each student identified for themselves. Students filled a variety of roles at the festival according to their interests.

School principal Darby Meade observed, “Our school’s guiding principles are around innovation, inspiring students to create, and really imagining what it is that we can be. We don’t necessarily know what is going to be out there in ten or fifteen years… we believe in problem solving and teaching kids to fail. The amount of information is continuing to increase--if we just cover the curriculum, we’re getting further and further behind.”


Relevant professional learning at Fall Creek Middle School, Fall Creek, WI:

Sixth grade teacher Toby Jacobson and his colleague David Ross received encouragement from Brad LaPoint, their principal, to make project-based learning the focus of their professional learning through a district-wide system that uses teachers’ individual goal-setting to drive professional learning.
Other teachers identified professional learning goals related to growth mindset, reading strategies, special education connection with families, and more; the program culminates in a “Goal Day” street fair where teachers share what they’ve learned.
Jacobson reflected, “This culture really took off in the last three years. In the first couple years, there was more focus from the staff on just getting through the process. Now it’s more like people take it on themselves, asking ‘How am I going to get better this year?’”


“How am I going to get better this year?” and its partner “How are we going to get better this year?” are the right questions to be asking. In any org, the response should begin with culture—the one we have, and the one we want to create. If we don’t get that right, it’s quite likely our strategies will amount to little more than the crumbs left on a breakfast plate.


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How much influence should parents have over what happens in their children’s schools?

You already know this question has sparked some lively discussion across our state and in the national news.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer.

At one extreme: an old-school approach. Parents are “informed” more often than “engaged” as collaborators. Parents are invited to support the school in certain limited ways: as a room parent, a chaperone, a fundraiser.

I don’t like this approach because I know parents have more to offer and that schools are stronger when parents play a larger role. Research tells us that schools with strong family engagement are 10 times more likely to improve student learning outcomes, and that it matters as much as rigorous curriculum and high-quality school leadership.

At the other extreme, however, is an approach that feels equally untenable to me: parents who feel like they can—and must—weigh in on nearly every facet of their school’s operation. This approach is cumbersome, advantages those parents with the time and skills to advocate, telegraphs mistrust of school staff, and often has unintended negative consequences for the students we’re trying to educate.

For example, a new state law in Tennessee requires educators to catalog every book in every school. Some teachers who have built up sizable classroom libraries are opting to dismantle them because the cataloguing directive seems too daunting; it’s Tennessee’s students—only one-third of whom are reading at a “proficient” level—who will suffer.

So how do we strike the right balance? To help guide my own thinking, I’ve been spending some time with the PTA’s National Standards for Family-School Partnerships. There are several national organizations that have produced guidance about family engagement, but I am partial to the PTA’s work because it is a nonpartisan group with well-established governance regulations and financial transparency.

Just this year the PTA updated its Standards for Family-School Partnerships. The PTA’s iterative process involved more than 600 local and state PTA leaders, members, researchers and administrators.

​Each of the six standards has related goals and performance indicators. You can find the full text on the PTA website, but in brief here are the standards:

If you dig into what changed when the PTA updated its standards this year, you’ll find the following revisions, which feel very significant to me:

1. A shift from “opportunities to volunteer” to “opportunities to contribute”—signaling that parents have more to offer than simply filling volunteer slots. (But keep doing that, too!)
2. Where the standards previously acknowledged “economic barriers to participation,” they now speak to other linguistic and cultural barriers.
3. The standards now talk about co-developing communication expectations and protocols with families and staff.
4. Adding clear statements about eliminating bias in family engagement approaches and encouraging leadership among historically marginalized groups.
5. A shift from “informing” families about students’ academic progress to partnering with families to ensure two-way communication about students’ strengths and needs and to set goals.
6. Engaging families in decision making in ways that go beyond surveys. Tracking data and filling gaps for representative input and power in decisions so that diverse perspectives are considered.
7. Describing in more detail how school-community partnerships could be conceived and managed to benefit students and staff, including mapping community assets and needs, and aligning community partners to school improvement planning.

In short, what I see (that I like) in these standards is a shift towards inclusiveness, collaboration and sharing power.

​But what does “sharing power” between schools and families entail?

I think it means drawing upon the strengths of the various players. Parents know their students in a way that teachers can’t. They know what may be particularly motivating or challenging for their kids, and this knowledge is gold in the hands of an interested teacher. Educators know the research-based approaches that will help all kinds of students move from Point A to Point B. They also have additional context: they’ve worked with dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of students who may have benefitted from similar instructional strategies. 

Educators also commit to serve the greater good—that means doing what’s right for all kids, not just what I think is right for my kid. Think about that: the significant work it takes and the incredible promise of every child feeing safe, valued, appropriately supported and intellectually challenged.  No parent should ever have the right, in the name of “sharing power” or “parental control,” to take that away from another parent’s child.

Creating effective family-school partnerships is complex and increasingly contentious work. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. The answer is not to double down on the old-school model that shuts families out or boxes them in. Instead, maybe we can create spaces where we can talk about this partnership model. Maybe in your parent group or school staff meeting—or better yet, all together—you can explore questions like these:

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• How can we learn about and meet families’ communication preferences?
• How can parents improve the ways they communicate with school staff?
• What would it look like if teachers, families and students worked together to set social, emotional and academic goals?
• What are some new and potentially promising ways that school staff could get to know students and families and their strengths?
• What work do we need to do (all around) to recognize and eliminate biases?
• How could we give families and students a voice in decisions that affect children? What kinds of decisions? What does “a voice” mean to us?

I’d love to hear how you would answer these questions. Please reach out. I’m interested as a parent, a former PTA leader, and as a School Board member—because of course I believe that what the PTA has outlined for family-school partnerships is relevant for family-school district partnerships, too.

A few months before she died unexpectedly at age 61, Texas educator Rita Pierson gave a TED Talk and recalled a colleague telling her, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like." 

We’ve known for quite some time that positive teacher-student relationships boost students’ academic achievement. We’ve always assumed that this is because students feel safe to take risks with someone they trust and are motivated to do their best work.

Research published earlier this month, however, explores a different explanation for the higher test scores and GPAs in classrooms where relationships are strongest: Are these students learning more because they are being taught more effectively? That is: do positive teacher-student relationships actually change the way that teachers teach?

It turns out the answer is “Yes.” This is some of the first research that really examines the effect of positive teacher-student relationships on teachers themselves.

The study recently published in the journal Learning and Instruction focused on evaluation data gathered over two school years for Missouri educators teaching grades 4-10. The researchers conclude:

Positive teacher-student relationships lead primary and secondary teachers to move effectively implement three complex teaching practices examined in this study: cognitive engagement in the content, problem solving and critical thinking, and instructional monitoring… teachers are more likely to check in, monitor, scaffold, provide more constructive feedback to students, have greater confidence in their students’ abilities and use better scaffolding strategies for critical thinking.

The researchers were also able to test “the direction of effect,” meaning they were able to show that the positive teacher-student relationships predict and precede higher-quality instruction. This was true regardless of the teacher’s years of experience, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school, and the school-level proficiency rate on state tests.

Why do I bring this up right now? Because we’re heading into a new school year, and we would do well to spend some time in the first weeks attending to relationships. I don’t mean the traditional “fill out this questionnaire, Back To School Night” kinds of interactions: I mean prioritizing and investing the time it takes for teachers to deeply know their students, and vice versa. This investment will pay dividends all year long. Last August, I wrote about what this could look like. At the time I was thinking about its effect on students, but this recent research now has me considering its effect on teachers, too.

When I was a teacher a million years ago, conventional wisdom held that teachers should be especially stern the first few weeks of school. Lay down the law. Demonstrate that you are in control. This was especially true if you were a 23-year-old teaching high school students just seven or eight years younger than you.
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There’s no question that teachers need classroom management skills. But they also need relationship skills, and the time to apply them, which I believe create the conditions for a well-functioning classroom.

Good relationships improve student learning. And it just may be that teachers have as much to gain as their students in the bargain.

Since I joined the School Board in January, there hasn’t been a week that’s gone by when I haven’t been part of a conversation about mental health and school safety.

Locally and nationally, we have data confirming that many of our young people are struggling, socially and mentally. And that struggle manifests in many ways: anxiety, depression, self-harm, truancy, substance abuse, withdrawal, bullying, fighting and more.(1)

“We’re seeing a lot of juvenile behavior this year,” Martin Urbach, a teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, told me during a Zoom conversation a few weeks ago. “Misbehavior in class, throwing things, horsing around. Also more interpersonal issues—many students have lost the ability to socialize.” He’s also concerned about behaviors stemming from deep trauma that many students have experienced. “Life is not OK.”

I reached out to Martin because I had visited his school in 2018 and 2019. At the time, I was struck by the strong culture they’d created in a public high school serving predominantly students of color and students from lower-income families. I was curious how the school was faring since the onset of COVID.

Martin, who now works full-time as the school’s restorative justice coordinator, told me that it has been “exhausting.” The 31 students trained in peer mediation at Harvest have run more than 200 restorative justice circles this year—a significant increase over prior years.

In response to what they’re seeing, Martin and his students (at Harvest they’re called “Circle Keepers”) have added a mentorship component to their restorative justice work.  Every 10th grade Circle Keeper is mentoring a 9th grader who’s been involved in a circle due to concerning behavior. Amber, one of the 10th grade mentors, told me, “I want them to think of me friend-wise, and just to be there to help them whenever they need.”

Martin, Amber, and the other students involved in Harvest’s restorative justice work are part of a larger movement to infuse restorative practices at schools across the country. Restorative justice is an approach that emphasizes mediation, helping students understand the causes and consequences of their behavior, and making amends for harm that was done in order to repair and restore relationships.

"We have to change the paradigm of how we look at ‘infractions,’” Martin told me when we talked earlier this month. “We reframe it from ‘rules are broken’ to ‘people are harmed.’”

Across the country at Balboa High School in San Francisco, principal Kevin Kerr has pinned to his bulletin board a list of five “restorative questions” to ask students in trouble. Among them is the one he considers most important: “What do you think needs to be done to make things as right as possible?”

Restorative practices are gaining traction as many school districts move away from the “zero-tolerance” exclusionary discipline popularized in previous decades. “In the ‘90s and 2000s, schools started cracking down on minor misbehavior,” said Aaron Kupchik, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. “These behaviors posed no threat to student safety—talking back, cursing, dress code violations. Suspension became the normal reaction.”

In contrast, restorative justice aims to keep students integrated into the school community whenever possible. “We want to be sure they don’t think they’re throwaways,” Martin told me. Students can be suspended at Harvest, or even expelled, if restorative practices haven’t worked or if the school is legally required to suspend in response to certain behaviors (e.g., bringing a knife to school). But it’s widely understood to be the option of last resort, and the school follows specific restorative protocols when it’s time for the student to rejoin the school community.

I wasn’t sure if the uptick in concerning behaviors at Harvest this year (as in many other schools across the country) would have compelled school leaders to adopt more traditional discipline. I get it: school staff members are under tremendous pressure this year. Parents are worried. Police have been called to both of my own kids’ schools in the past few months in response to threats. Why, especially now, would anyone take on the extra work that real restorative justice requires?


The trouble with suspensions and the benefits of belonging

When a student is a danger to themselves or others, it’s absolutely appropriate to remove them to a setting where danger is minimized and they can get help. In theory, this is what suspension is supposed to accomplish.

​In many US schools, however, it’s overused, and that has negative consequences for the whole school community.(2) Suspended students are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to be incarcerated. Students with disabilities and Black students are suspended at disproportionately high rates, and research has confirmed that this overrepresentation is because they are punished more harshly for similar offenses.

Are suspensions an effective deterrent to future misbehavior? No—in fact, they increase its likelihood. What does deter fighting, bullying, and other troubling behaviors are restorative practices.  Recent, rigorous evaluations in Minnesota and California confirm that restorative approaches also improve academic performance.

This makes sense to me, because I believe that behavior is a form of communication, and “misbehavior” is a student trying to communicate that something is very wrong. Often it’s difficult (even for adults!) to articulate exactly what’s bothering us and what we need. It can take real time and effort to get to root causes and solutions, and sometimes that’s not our go-to response.

“Our instinct is to hate the other person,” says Tamar Shoshan, a junior at Manhattan Hunter Science High School in New York City. “Cancel culture plays a large part in that. We’re taught that if a person does one thing wrong, we label them as a bad person. [We have to] acknowledge that people are complex, and they have reasons for acting out.” We have to call them in—not call them out.

Seeing others this way requires curiosity, generosity and empathy—but without stinting on accountability. “Nobody is letting anybody off the hook,” said Balboa HS principal Kevin Kerr. “Whenever we have one of these restorative justice sessions, the perpetrator inevitably walks out of the room crying. That’s not our goal, but it’s just natural. We’re human beings, we’re going to have a sense of compassion for this person that we harmed, once we have a chance to see how our actions made them feel.”

What does it take to do it right?

Restorative justice is most effective when it’s part of a larger fabric of restorative practices in schools. “Restorative justice” is commonly understood to be a method for intervening in response to specific conflicts or misdeeds—it’s often reactive. “Restorative practices” encompass a larger set of tactics that schools can use to proactively build strong communities.

Schools that have a holistic approach to restorative practices often have a tiered system that looks something like this:

• Tier One: Community-building activities like morning meetings, small-group advisories, and teachers and students working collaboratively to create classroom rules and jobs. These activities involve all staff and students at the school, and often families. For example, last year at Harvest Collegiate while instruction was virtual, the school coordinated weekly mental health circles co-led by students and staff members.
• Tier Two: Smaller groups convene in response to a specific problem or conflict. The group includes the harmed student, the person causing the harm, and a group of their peers and/or adults. They’ll talk about what happened and what can be done to repair the harm. The student who was harmed must feel no pressure to participate, but often elects to do so.
• Tier Three: Practices aimed at reintegrating students who’ve been out of school due to suspension, expulsion, incarceration or truancy.

It takes real time, effort and intention to do this with fidelity. School staff members need a strong, shared definition of restorative practices: what they are, why they’re important, and how to implement them. Often, one or more staff members are designated as restorative justice coordinators and receive special training for that role; all staff members need time, training and support to implement “Tier One” practices like those described above.

Derek Hinckley, a eighth-grade teacher in Chicago, taught for ten years but still didn’t feel like he had a good working knowledge of restorative practices, despite working in a school that espoused the approach.

“I never received any formal training on what restorative practices look like and how to do them well,” Hinckley said. “I have my understanding of how to use restorative practices in my classroom, but that’s not necessarily what everybody else means.”

Shifting a school to a restorative model is hard work for leaders, too. Dr. Ben Williams, the founding principal of Ron Brown Collegiate Preparatory High School in Washington, DC, talked to me in 2018 about the difficulty of launching the District’s first all-male public high school with a restorative justice culture. “There’s nobody out there trying to do what I’m doing,” he told me. “It’s lonely work.” Even though Williams recruited staff with the understanding that they’d need to buy into the school’s restorative approach, and even though parents actively opted in to send their sons to the new school, he noted that many families and staff members still expected, and even pushed for, exclusionary discipline measures.

Allan Benton, a school principal in California, has been using restorative practices for nearly a decade. He cautions that it’s all too tempting for school and district administrators to distort restorative justice as a “quick fix”solution to unfavorable rates of suspension and expulsion.

“We saw schools quickly turn [toward restorative justice],” Benton said. “Suspensions went to zero, but you had a horrible school climate, and kids were afraid because [their peers] were doing really bad things that weren’t being properly dealt with. Just getting suspensions to disappear isn’t helping, nor is it actually restorative justice.”

With time and effort, however, restorative practices yield good dividends. At Harvest, 98% of students report that their teachers treat them with respect. 97% say they feel safe in the hallways, bathrooms, locker rooms, and cafeteria. And 93% of families say that school staff work hard to build trusting relationships with families like them.

Perfect? No—but I like those odds. I’m curious to learn more and do more in this area, and I hope you are, too.


(1) See for example the CDC Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey; the AACAP’s Declaration of a National Emergency in Children’s Mental Health; and this recent RAND survey of California principals.
(2) For an excellent roundup of relevant research, please see the Learning Policy Institute’s October 2021 brief “Building a Positive School Climate Through Restorative Practices.”

On Wednesday, the Arlington Public Schools hosted its annual "Celebration of Excellence" to honor exemplary employees who have been nominated by their colleagues, students and members of the community.

As a School Board member, it was a treat to be at the ceremony and to recognize the eleven teachers, support employees and principal who were honored. 

One of the honorees, Iris Gibson, is a business education teacher at the Langston High School Continuation Program, and she gave a speech that really moved me. 

It's National Teacher Appreciation Week, and Iris's words remind me how life-changing, complex, and wonderful the work of teaching can be. 

She says it better than I ever could, and she's given me permission to share her words with you. ​