Tag: Culture change

Building A School Reading Culture – Part 4 What Is A Reading Culture?

In this series, which I started last year, I have been exploring building a strong reading culture in my school. It was something we had identified as a library team as a goal to work towards. You can read part one here. I then started to investigate organisational culture research and culture change research and methods. These have all given me some excellent information and starting points. It has also guided my practice for the last six months as I stepped into acting head of library and into a position to drive change.

Now it’s time to look a little more closely at reading cultures, what exactly a reading culture is and why is it something to strive towards.

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Building A School Reading Culture – Part 3 Culture Change Research

In my last post on Building A Reading Culture, I shared my dive into the research around organisational culture. You can read my journey into building a reading culture from the start, in this first post Building A School Reading Culture Part 1 Getting Started.

When I decided to investigate the reading culture at our school, I wanted to do it properly and I was inspired to look beyond the school library context by my mentor, Dr Kay Oddone and her fantastic post on her website LinkingLearning. So, I began my journey within the business and organisation context. Looking at the research around organisational culture helped me to understand that culture is not only the “way things are done around here” but also the underpinning beliefs, values, assumptions and thoughts around the future of the organisation.

However, this is just a starting point. The true power rests in being able to change the culture we have.

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Building A School Reading Culture – Part 2  Organisational Culture Research

Building a positive reading culture might seem like a pretty obvious goal for a school librarian. It makes sense, right? It’s an admirable goal and the importance of such can be supported with evidence around the benefits of reading across academic, social, and emotional domains. But when I set myself a goal of building a positive reading culture at my school, I was challenged to think more deeply about the process. What exactly is a positive reading culture? What does that look like and how can I measure that? You can read about the start of this journey in my post Building A School Reading Culture Part 1 Getting Started.

In this second part in my journey, I’ve been investigating organisational culture, outside of just the school library realm. This then led me to investigating organisation climate. Before I could unpack what a reading culture is and how to measure and improve it, I first needed to understand what culture is at an organisational level. I started by diving into the literature around organisational culture.

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