Introduction​

 

We spend our lives exploring our identities, trying to figure out who we are as people. It is a never-ending search as we are constantly changing. We all have a unique story that has shaped our identity and continues to reshape it. If we want to know ourselves and be able to tell our own stories, we need to keep searching for the elusive answer to that question: ‘Who am I?’ But what about schools? Our schools also have unique stories, and the search for identity starts with knowing what that story is. We explore our school, identify the story, and in the telling of that story, we shape it over time. That is the short version of this book.

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Here is a slightly longer one. In today’s competitive educational landscape, International Baccalaureate (IB) schools face the challenge of standing out. We offer the same programs, so what is different about us? What makes us special? Again, that question: Who are we? In order for a community to move in a similar direction, we need to share a story. This story needs to be clear, compelling, and accurate; clear to help us understand ourselves; compelling to connect and resonate among us; and accurate to reflect both who we are and who we want to be. Storytelling becomes a powerful tool, not just to let people outside the school know what we are about, but to help all of us within the school know what we are about. We need to know this story we share, particularly as it evolves over time. This is where the introspection of an individual is much like the introspection of the school and why we need to tell our school’s story from the inside out.

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Some years ago, a family interested in my middle school sat across from me and asked what my school had to offer them. ‘What’s special about this school? Why should we come here?’ I talked about the IB programs. The parents said that other schools had the IB. I mentioned how caring our community was, and they said that the other schools were caring. Our facilities were great, but of course, other schools had excellent facilities. Our approach to teaching and learning was inquiry-based and student-centered. Once again, as the parents reminded me, we were just one of many. It struck me at the time that I was unprepared to tell our unique story. I knew many great things about my school but was not able to articulate them, at least clearly or concisely. Considered as isolated components, many schools are very similar as this conversation reminded me. Our stories emerge from the interaction of the component parts, and at the time, I was unprepared to bring my school’s story to life. I could not connect the parts so I was unable to capture what the school felt like. This essence of a school that we can feel is school culture. That is what I needed to capture.

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These parents were not being unreasonable, and I came to value their feedback over the next few years. Yes, they eventually enrolled their two children, despite my initial rather inadequate articulation of my school’s unique identity. When talking about their decision to choose my school, they said that they liked the friendly atmosphere and felt that their child would be supported and allowed to be an individual. This came from observations on the initial school tour and some time spent at a school event where they had a chance to see our students interacting with each other as well as with the teachers. I knew what they meant as I could feel it, as well. The school was a place where you could feel at home amid the craziness of the middle school years. It seemed that in order to discover the story, I needed to look deeper inside my school to discover what this family had felt on their tour.

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As this conversation with the family demonstrated, I needed to be able to articulate my school’s identity with more clarity but before I could do that I needed to understand that identity better. My starting point was considering the interactions between the different parts that made up the school. In particular, I needed to identify the parts that represented the deeply held values that drove the school community and how these values interacted with other parts of school life. This interaction between the parts is what sets schools apart and therefore forms the basis of our unique story.

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As the two terms, school culture and school identity have been mentioned, it may be useful to look at the difference between them. The main distinction for the purpose of this discussion is that school identity is what makes the school recognizable while school culture is about the shared values and behaviors that shape the social and educational environment. That is, identity is what a school looks like from the outside and culture is what it feels like from the inside.

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We can think of school identity as the unique and defining characteristics that set a school apart from other schools, which is central to differentiating an IB school in a crowded marketplace. These characteristics typically include several parts which come to collectively define the school’s unique character and include mission, vision, values, traditions, rituals, curriculum framework, programs, student body, physical environment, leadership, governance, symbols, and community engagement, to name just a few. The common attribute of all of these parts is that they can be fairly easily identified and described from the outside.

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School culture is more difficult to identify and describe as it deals with what is going inside of a group of people’s heads at a point in time. It is the shared understanding of how we do things. Understandings are hard enough to identify and describe in individuals as we all understand in different ways so when we look at collective understandings, the complexity of the phenomenon can be daunting. However, we can approach the task of identifying and describing school culture by recognizing that any description is going to be an approximation and make our peace with that.

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School culture and school identity, however, are obviously related. As school identity is what a school looks like from the outside, its culture, or the way a school feels from the inside, will impact these perceptions. Conversely, the way a school appears from the outside will impact how a school feels on the inside. Again, a comparison with an individual helps to clarify this distinction. The way people perceive us impacts the way we feel, and vice versa. So it is with any organization, but particularly so for a school, the most human of our organizations.

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The implication of this understanding for our work on shaping school culture is that culture building is focused on shifting the way insiders act. As identity construction is a product of the perceptions of both insiders and outsiders of those actions, culture building is the first step in any attempt to construct a particular identity. That is, we start with culture and let identity take care of itself (more or less)!

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In this sense, we could consider school culture as the foundation stone of school identity. As school identity is the way a school presents itself to the outside world, a school can promote its culture as one of its distinguishing features that impact each and every one of those component parts. Here we see the relevance for communicating an IB school’s unique story as our school cultures are what ultimately set us apart from other schools. Many schools share a range of component parts, but it is school culture which will both explain and determine how those parts interact in a unique way. This brings us to the idea that school culture needs to be a central element in the stories we tell about our school as it is the glue that holds everything else together.

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This book is primarily focused on exploring school culture as the foundational element of a school’s identity. Bringing school culture into the conversation to understand and influence the component parts of a school’s identity provides a means to develop specific types of culture. It is a powerful cycle. In this way, storytelling can both build culture and shape identity. School marketing becomes culture building.

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In the following pages, we explore the significance of school culture-based storytelling in the context of a series of IB schools and examine a four-step approach for identifying and communicating a school’s story. A series of vignettes and real-life examples are used to illustrate how day-to-day conversations within a school can reveal its deeply held values and shape its identity. By understanding the elements of a school’s story, we can articulate a clear identity that reflects school culture and therefore resonates with the community. Sounds simple!

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The approach involves these four steps:

STEP 1: Locating the big ideas within the school's discourse.

STEP 2: Finding the supporting ideas to contextualize those big ideas.

STEP 3: Clarify the meaning and relationships between the ideas.

STEP 4: Shifting conversations through existing discourse routines.

 

​​​Each of the four schools represented in the vignettes have their unique contexts, challenges and leadership questions. The four steps for communicating a school’s story have been examined within these different school environments. I wonder if you can see any similarities in your own school environments. We all face similar issues albeit experienced in our unique ways.

 

Vignette 1 - PreK-12 International school, Tokyo

• Context: Rapid growth with little competition and strong demand. The only international school and IB program in the area at the time.

• Challenge: Families were joining but often not buying into the program.

• Leadership Question: How do we get families to understand and support our program?

• Outcome: Enrollment growth from 160 to 650 over a period of eight years. A strong commitment to the program emerged with high retention rates.

 

Vignette 2 - PreK-12 Independent school, Hawaii

• Context: Relatively new campus with a need to grow numbers in the middle and high school. Heavy competition and high attrition rates in middle and high school.

• Challenge: Attrition after primary school.

• Leadership Question: How do we develop a middle school sense of identity?

• Outcome: Enrollment growth from 65% to 95% in the middle school over a five-year period from increased retention with corresponding figures in the high school as middle school families chose to stay with the school.

 

Vignette 3 - PreK-12 International School, Hiroshima

• Context: High enrollment fluctuations. Major enrollment source pulling out. Unprecedented competition from new IB schools in the area.

• Challenge: Attrition after primary school and declining primary enrollments.

• Leadership Question: What do we really offer beyond the IB?

• Outcome: From an enrollment crisis to the highest enrollment numbers in the school’s sixty-five year history within a period of six years, achieved primarily through retention.

 

Vignette 4 - PreK-12 International School, Tokyo

• Context: New high school campus with a need to grow numbers in a highly competitive international school environment.

• Challenge: Attrition after the senior school campus move.

• Leadership Question: How do we get families to stay after middle school and join the new campus located a significant distance away?

• Outcome: The senior school reached capacity for on-campus students within two years due mainly to increased retention.

 

This is an exploration of experiences related to clarifying and communicating school identity, some attempts, of course, being more successful than others. Experience is the ultimate teacher so these emerging ideas are presented as reflections using this vignette format. The four steps presented can potentially act as a guide for you if you are looking at clarifying your IB school’s story and you would like to try a similar approach in your own school context.

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The information presented about the schools in these brief histories all exist within the public domain in one way or another and the observations are my personal reflections from my time spent working in these contexts. Different observers would all reach different conclusions, although there would undoubtedly be shared threads. These vignettes have been pieced together from memories, as we do with all past events, so that they make more sense in the present than they did in the past. As with all educational advice, let my lessons be your lessons but be sure to take it all with a grain of salt.

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