School culture is something you cultivate
for the benefit of teachers and students
In last week’s post, I argued that students can’t learn if they’re trapped in a culture of opting out or perfectionism. A culture of error and openness to learning requires something different: students need to know that participation is expected, mistakes are part of learning, and the goal isn’t perfection but progress.
But recognising the culture we want is the more straightforward part. The harder question is how we cultivate it—particularly when students move between multiple classrooms, teachers and different sets of expectations every day. This is where individual classroom practice becomes a collective responsibility, and where consistency between teachers can make it possible for everyone—learners and educators—to succeed.
Changing the culture of a school where opting out or perfectionism has become normal may seem like a daunting task, but the benefits of doing so can ripple through the lives of students and teachers alike.
I think we have reached a critical point in many of our schools where we can no longer tolerate such a low bar for participation and effort. I talk to schools about checking for listening and checking for understanding—key teaching practices that ensure lessons are on track. But many primary and secondary teachers report that students will barely give them eye contact let alone a verbal or gestural response to show they are participating.
Yet, when I show teachers examples of classrooms where such norms have been embedded and educators have developed a sense of collective evanescence and joy in learning again, few teachers would see what the example schools have done as authoritarian or demeaning to developing learners. Instead of seeing the result for what it is (hard work and consistency), it’s sometimes easier to think that there must be something intrinsically different about these ‘model students’ compared to mine…
You might reasonably wonder how you could possibly turn around a ship as large as a school community onto a different course especially in schools where behavioural issues both (passive and aggressive) are rife. Many leaders may feel that you are simply stuck with the students and teachers you have, working in the ways they currently work—even when everyone knows those ways are less than ideal…
Change can be phased in
But cultural change doesn’t have to happen everywhere at once. One possibility is a phased approach that deliberately and incrementally changes the culture of a school one or two year levels at a time.
The transition from primary to secondary school provides a particularly powerful opportunity, even for high schools experiencing these challenges. As students arrive in Year 7, we don’t have to tell them if the older students are mostly disengaged, if they’re frequently on their phones or laptops, if they don’t usually listen unless something happens to interest them, or if answering questions and participating in lessons is somehow a primary-school habit they should now leave behind.
Instead, we can simply deliver the new high standard of expectations and say: this is how Year 7 is. This is how we participate. This is how we use mini-whiteboards. This is how we discuss an idea with a partner. This is how we respond when someone makes an error. This is what happens when the teacher asks a question. This is how we use—or deliberately don’t use—our devices. This is what learning looks like here.
Then, as that cohort progresses into Year 8, we continue the story. The next Year 7 cohort enters the same culture. A year later, the expectations move again. What initially felt like an intervention gradually becomes simply how our school works.
This is how we can achieve cultural change for students and teachers alike: not by waiting for teenagers to become intrinsically motivated enough to participate, but by deliberately creating a learning community in which participation, effort and curiosity become normal.
No Opt Out doesn’t mean no support
Lemov’s No Opt Out technique captures an important principle here. If an interaction begins with a student unable to answer, wherever possible it should finish with that student successfully giving the answer (even if that response needs to be scaffolding). The response ‘I don’t know…’ can be a perfectly legitimate point in the learning process; It just shouldn’t automatically become the end of it.
As I sometimes put it to teachers, “No one should feel comfortable to just ‘check out’ in your classroom.” That line is deliberately provocative because it forces us to distinguish two very different things.
Students absolutely should feel safe to make a mistake, ask for help, say something imperfectly, change their minds and discover that someone else knows something they don’t. But feeling safe to learn isn’t the same thing as being permitted not to learn.
Pair shares can give students an idea before reporting back. Mini-whiteboards allow everybody to capture, rehearse, refined or revise an answer simultaneously.
Choral response can let students practise difficult terminology without being individually exposed. Carefully designed cold call can gradually normalise the idea that everybody will be doing thinking and everybody will be expected to respond. The goal isn’t stress and anxiety; it is to use a positive form of pressure to make participation so normal—and so well supported—that students no longer need to protect themselves by disappearing.
What if some of my students always fly under the radar?
This initial hurdle is, I think, one of the hardest things to remedy, for schools experiencing a culture of opting out. If students have spent years learning that silence, invisibility and non-participation are available options, asking them suddenly to join in can feel profoundly unnatural. But that doesn’t make the challenge impossible. It makes consistency more important.
One teacher trying choral responses twice a week can easily be dismissed as the eccentric exception. In contrast, a whole year level in which students encounter the same broad expectations to listen, respond, rehearse, discuss and share their thinking will establish something entirely different.
And that brings us back to a recurring theme in this piece: cultural change becomes much more achievable when we work together and row in the same direction, to borrow the metaphor used by Peps Mccrea.
Culture doesn’t stop at the classroom door
A teacher can work incredibly hard to establish a culture where everyone participates, mistakes are part of learning, students listen to each other and everyone is expected to try again. But students don’t have one teacher. They have many teachers as part of one learning community.
This raises one of the more difficult conversations I have with schools: how much consistency should we expect between classrooms?
Teachers rightly value autonomy. Nobody wants schools populated by robots delivering identical lessons from identical scripts. But there is another extreme that we should be equally wary of: unnecessary inconsistency, or variance for variance’s sake.
Such variability starts to become very noticeable to students and fellow staff:
One teacher expects every student to participate; across the corridor, participation is optional.
One teacher carefully establishes a mini-whiteboard routine; another uses them occasionally as a novelty.
One teacher treats an incorrect answer as an opportunity for discussion; somewhere else, the safest strategy is to say nothing.
One teacher expects devices to be away when they aren’t required; in the next classroom, students have completely different expectations.
Students then have to navigate an invisible obstacle course on top of the curriculum itself. They are constantly working out:
What are the rules here? Do I have to answer? Can I call out? Are we actually using the whiteboards? Am I expected to explain my thinking? What happens if I’m wrong?The adult may experience these differences as ‘professional autonomy’. The student experiences them as cognitive and behavioural noise. And the students least equipped to negotiate all those invisible differences are ones who need consistency the most.
Personal preference and professional responsibility
Some teachers I work with worry about the time and effort required to align practice across a school. There is an natural intuitive belief that as teachers are professionals, they need to be left alone to do their work, and that allowing each teacher to develop an individual style is important if teaching is to feel ‘authentic’.
There is truth in that. We don’t want a school of rigid machines churning out uniform lessons; we want a school of thoughtful navigators—maintaining consistency where it provides clarity, yet intentionally deviating from the agreed plan when it enriches and deepens the learning experience. Personality, humour, subject expertise, relationships and professional judgement are all part of excellent teaching. But my standard response is that, ultimately, teaching isn’t really about the teacher.
Our personal preference matters, but it cannot be the organising principle of a student’s education. The lesson, the unit, the school experience belongs to the students ultimately. It is their time, their working memory, their attention and their opportunity to learn that our decisions either make good use of—or else waste.
This changes the question considerably. Instead of asking, Do I personally prefer cold call? Do I like mini-whiteboards? Is this how I naturally structure a lesson?;
The more professionally important questions are: What do our students need? What practices have we collectively decided are important? And what degree of consistency would make it easier for students to succeed across the school?
Because students don’t experience our classrooms in isolation. If much of a student’s energy is spent navigating a multitude of expectations, routines and participation norms that are present in one classroom and absent in the next, that isn’t a particularly good use of their limited working memory—or their motivation.
One classroom says devices away; another allows them throughout. One expects everybody to participate; another relies almost entirely on volunteers.
One classroom treats mistakes as an ordinary part of learning; another inadvertently teaches students that the safest course is to wait until someone else provides the right answer.
One teacher establishes a precise mini-whiteboard routine; another encourages students to use them if they feel like it, for allow students to treat the whiteboard as a doodling pad in both senses of the phrase.
From the teacher’s perspective, these differences can feel like expressions of personality or creativity. From the student’s perspective, they install that invisible cognitive obstacle course.
Collaboration involves individual compromise
This is why collaboration requires some compromise. As I put it in my work with schools, “You don’t get change in your school—you don’t get collaboration—without some sort of compromise between personal preference and professional responsibility.”
Professional responsibility means accepting that the collectively agreed approach isn’t always what I would have chosen if I were designing my classroom entirely for myself. But I’m not designing it for myself. The end user is the student.
That doesn’t mean every teacher has to sound the same, explain things identically or relinquish professional judgement. It means agreeing on enough of the things that matter—participation, routines, checking for understanding, responding to errors, curriculum sequencing—that students experience a coherent learning culture rather than having to decode a new one every 50 minutes.
There is also a useful cognitive principle underneath this: consistency can actually create freedom. When routines and expectations become familiar, students have to devote less attention to figuring out how this classroom works. More of their finite cognitive resources can be directed towards the thing we actually care about: the mathematics, the history, the science, the literature, the art—the learning itself.
That is the trade-off worth making: not consistency for the convenience of management, and not consistency because teachers can’t be trusted, but consistency in the service of students’ attention, learning and opportunity.
When teachers establish that together, they can stop unwittingly undermining one another’s work. The participation expected in English strengthens the participation expected in Science. The Culture of Error developed in Mathematics makes it safer to attempt something difficult in Humanities. Familiar routines travel with the student rather than having to be rebuilt from scratch in every room.
We can support one another’s work, or inadvertently undermine it. We may even have situations where 95% of teachers are working on such goals consistently, with only 5% of teachers not using such routines and norms with fidelity; a small number who disagree with the approach of the school, or have lower expectations for participation because they say they don’t need them. Unfortunately, even if the proportion is just 5%, such inconsistency becomes a weak point in your school’s socio-cultural fabric. That is, students will fixate on such teachers where they ‘don’t have to…’ and seek to exploit this weakness to pressure other teachers to also lower the bar. Not for any nefarious reason per se, but because kids are human and will often look for shortcuts or breaks if they get them…
We don’t want the hard work of nearly every teacher to be undermined by one or two weak links in the school’s norms and culture of high expectations.
There is a difference between collaboration and co-operation
We want genuine collaboration rather than mere cooperation.
Cooperation can look like: I’ll write the Year 7 unit, you write Year 8, and we’ll swap resources.
Collaboration requires us to look together at the curriculum, look at our students, examine the evidence and ask how best to make the whole thing work. It means caring about the details, not just agreeing vaguely on the big picture.
That, ultimately, is why alignment matters. Consistency isn’t about making every teacher the same; it’s about calibrating our choices enough so that the important things that students experience, so they aren’t continually forced to decipher a different conception of learning across a given day.
What kind of culture are we building?
A school is powered by its culture—whether we deliberately shape it or not. It can instil a Culture of Error, where mistakes are expected and used for learning, and a Culture of Curiosity, where students are motivated to ask what comes next. It could also promulgate a culture of opting out and perfectionism, where the safest course is not to expose your thinking at all.
See the post from last week for an introduction to these competing cultures in schools.
See previous post
For an introduction to these competing cultures in schools
This is also why alignment and a Culture of Error belong in the same conversation. If students repeatedly experience participation, error correction, supportive challenge and high expectations across their school, those things cease to be the peculiar preferences of individual teachers. They become simply what learning is like here.
In the end, cultivating these cultures is a shared responsibility. We align on key practices that empower students to participate, take risks, and learn from error, while still nurturing the creativity that makes teaching vibrant.
By keeping in tension a) consistency where it supports students, and b) deviation where it enhances learning and collective effervescence, we ensure every student benefits from a culture of error and curiosity. In doing so, we create an environment of equity and excellence for all.
After all, it’s not about your own personal preferences—it’s about being the best version of ourselves to uplift our learners.
Want to go deeper?
Literacy Across the Curriculum — Melbourne, Sydney & Sunshine Coast
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Designed for primary and secondary teachers and leaders, these practical workshops explore how we can embed powerful reading, writing and oracy instruction across the curriculum—helping students access complex texts and concepts, develop disciplinary literacy and communicate increasingly sophisticated ideas.
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Mon 2 Nov 2026 - Sydney
Mon 30 Nov 2026 - Melbourne
Sunshine Coast — Jan 2027
Fri 22 Jan 2027 Pacific Paradise State School
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Unlocking Literacy: Unlocking the Power of Words for Reading and Spelling
This is a new Luminary Specialist Course with Dr Nathaniel Swain.
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Live webinars: 5, 12, 19 & 26 October 2026 at 6:30 pm AEDT
Recordings: Available for three weeks following the final webinar
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