Building School Culture Together

We hear the words “school culture” a lot and unless we really know what it means to be part of a culture, we can lose sight of where our culture is headed. To be clear, I am defining culture as the ideas, customs, values, and common behaviours we see within a community. So, our school culture is made up of the common ideas, customs, the values, and behaviours that we demonstrate daily at school.

Our current school culture is the reality of how we are thinking, valuing, and behaving, not our necessarily our ideal.

Building school culture on the other hand is setting the stage for how we would like to be thinking, valuing, and behaving.

If we look on the school website there are 5 core values listed: Integrity, Care & Compassion, Respect, Resilience and Responsibility. Each of these values is layered and complex. Each value could be defined in a million different ways and be looked at from a million different angles. More to the point, to reflect these values, we must continue to grow in our understanding and use of these values. Thinking about and demonstrating these values will not just profit our school culture, but also improve our individual sense of self and identity.

Life has not been easy for anyone these past two years. When life starts getting complicated, tough, or testing, we can lose our ability to think clearly and as that continues, we can lose our sense of self, our identity, our community and ultimately our culture. Therefore, I am calling us to practise our resilience. We CAN persevere and thrive. To prove your resilience, I encourage you as families, peers, or just individual members of the community to start digging into and focusing on one important thing about our school culture or one of our school values.

Our school values are, Integrity, Care & Compassion, Respect, Resilience, and Responsibility. In the Student Wellbeing Room there is a poster for each value. I am asking students (or teachers) to write their own definition of each value and email them to me (Cheyenne.Mason@education.vic.gov ) to add to the posters. If your student is onsite, they can write their definition on a post- it notes and add it themselves. For the next several weeks I will dig into what each value means to and for our community and let’s build and own our school culture again.

Indigenous Literacy Day

On another exciting note, Wednesday September 1st was Indigenous Literacy Day! I highly encourage you to check out more information about Indigenous Literacy Day using the link on the community page.

Cheyenne Mason, on behalf of the Wellbeing Team

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