Culture of Care

A Culture of Care is a theory that says schools and workplaces should put more importance on relationships than curriculum when determining their institutional purpose. It encourages one-on-one relationships.

There are three components to cultivating a culture of care.

• • Care for Learning
• • Care for Community
• • Care for Educational Excellence

Care for Learning

• • critical thinking and analysis
• • complex problem solving
• • active learning and learning strategies
• • resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility

Creating a culture of care for learning is when educators embrace their role in facilitating personalized learning relevant to the learner, building experiences that develop perseverance leading to student self-efficacy and creating a safe space for risk-taking where everyone belongs. These attributes can be realized through teachers intentionally using strategies that accelerate both social emotional and academic learning.

Care for Community

Creating care for the community requires educators to put words into action. Community involvement in the educational setting has always been touted to be important. Post-COVID, involvement is critical. With the school taking an active role in developing socio emotional dispositions, co-construction of those efforts through developing a shared vision with two-way communication is essential school system can create a culture of care expanding student learning.

Parents, caregivers, the community, educators, and the students themselves are essential in the development of children. It takes all parties to develop young adults who enter society prepared to transfer their learning to the context in which they will find themselves. To that end, three critical strategies for focusing on care for the community include two-way communication, giving voice to all stakeholders resulting in co-constructed actions for moving the needle in identified areas, and creating school systems that are hubs to community services such as public mental and physical health and welfare, opportunities for adult learning, and enrichment for learners

Care for Educational Excellence

Using the formative process as a frame for systemic continuous improvement, similar steps can be utilized by educational communities to determine the growth of a school.

• • Organizational clarity of the system’s mission, vision, and focus areas
• • Co-constructing goals with clear actions articulated as success criteria
• • Developing key performance indicators resulting in measurable outcomes
• • Collecting qualitative and quantitative data from all members of the educational community
• • Reflect and revise the goals to keep moving the needle within the focus area.

This process will result in a high degree of relational trust based upon shared core beliefs of all educational community members. The process honors the dignity of each unique individual who contributes to the system. The expansion of ownership of a school system’s success is now shared among all.