Culture Re-Boot Quotes

“Tradition, inertia, and a one-size-fits-all mentality (and, occasionally, budgets) stand in the way of establishing student-centered learning cultures.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Research finds that children who experience chronic adversity fare better or recover more successfully when they have a positive, stable emotional relationship with a competent adult, are good learners and problem solvers, are likeable, and have areas of competence and perceived efficacy valued by self or society.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Strong relationships with teachers and other school adults can help young people foster their resilience to overcome difficult family circumstances, frustrating school experiences, and negative peer norms.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“schools that use restorative practices—disciplinary methods that show understanding of students’ concerns that underlie their actions, provide consequences that have meaning for the student, help students see how their actions affect others, and problem solve with students, peers, and parents to help young people learn more effective ways of handling frustrations—work to resolve and prevent student misbehavior rather than penalize students by separating them from the classroom.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“In the early grades, being in positive classroom climates with friendly, considerate teachers is linked to greater self-regulation, less disruptive behavior, and higher teacher-rated social competence among elementary and middle school students. Middle school teachers whose classrooms support increasing student autonomy and competence can build personal relationships in which students feel known, valued, and respected. Gains in middle grade achievement and reduced levels of disruptive behavior are evidence in classrooms in which expectations are clear, time is used well and productively, and teachers respond effectively to variations in students’ motivation and focus. Similarly, strong, positive, and cooperative relationships with teachers increase high school students’ likelihood of graduating.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Strong and caring relationships with teachers help students achieve well at all grade levels.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Effective teachers show interest in their students both inside and outside the classroom.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Of all the relations at school, students’ affiliations with their teachers are the most important.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“For students to succeed, they must be personally known at school and have strong bonds with the people there.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Relationships are essential means for accomplishing important professional goals.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“An African American student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer friends of the same ethnicity than a white student with the same GPA. A Latino student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Latino students. In contrast, the higher the white students’ grades, the more popular they are, especially in public schools.17”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“stereotype threat theory argues that people tend to underperform when faced with situations that might confirm negative stereotypes about their social group. Here, highly capable students become so worried about performing poorly that they often end up making careless errors, they underachieve, or they stop caring about performing well. Rather than show their very real concern about failing, these pupils act coolly disinterested in school or its rules, become class clowns, study in secret, or avoid potentially threatening situations. Not caring about school sometimes becomes the group’s norm.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“identified oppositional culture theory, which posited that African American students responded to institutionalized racism by believing that doing well in school is “acting white.” According to this view, many minority students feel as if they have to choose between their minority identity and not learning (and keeping their peers happy) or learning and achieving well (and keeping their teachers and parents happy). As a consequence, these students enact a range of adaptive coping options—often disruptive to the learning environment or to their friendships—in attempts to placate their friends or their teachers. Similarly,”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“By embedding social web tools such as blogs and social bookmarks into the learning culture, both students and teachers can stay organized, focused, and advancing”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“online resources also extend opportunities for the most highly motivated and accomplished students to accelerate and deepen their learning—often anytime and anywhere.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Having choices about their education gives students a greater investment in their own learning.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Accumulating evidence affirms that teachers’ instructional interactions with children have the greatest value for students’ performance when they are focused, direct, intentional, and characterized by feedback loops involving student performance”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“schools, especially those with many low achievers, need both the academic press and accompanying high levels of academic and social supports to help them meet learning and achievement expectations.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Evidence indicates that strong academic press is especially critical to student achievement in low-income schools.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Research affirms that, where teachers become familiar with children’s interests and life experiences, they can use interactive instruction to build on students’ prior knowledge to engage them in higher-level thinking and comprehension.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“push for higher standards typically results in more demanding content, understanding and applying concepts, problem solving, and developing students’ facility with analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“The school culture creates press when it sets expectations that every student can master a high-standards curriculum. Principals create press when they expect teachers to teach the curriculum and to help each student reach the required mastery levels. Teachers can create press by expecting each student to learn the class’s objectives, by providing intellectually challenging and engaging work, by familiarizing students with the specific standards and criteria for work quality and quantity, and by the types and frequency of assignments and assessments they expect students to complete as evidence for accountability. Press also comes when school counselors include many demanding courses in students’ educational”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“It would be better for every child if teachers thought of student potential like an iceberg—most of it hidden from view—and act upon the belief that high trust, high expectations, and high supports will reveal what lies beneath.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Underestimating students’ abilities and desires to learn a high-challenge curriculum hurts them.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“•  Create a base of rigorous learning opportunities. Teachers begin with clear ideas about what learning should occur as the result of a lesson or unit aligned with assessments and standards. Then, teachers connect students with the curriculum by transforming student-boring topics into student-friendly concepts that have enduring value beyond the classroom, lie at the heart of the discipline, require analysis, have the potential to engage students, and span various cultures. Give students a reason for studying the curriculum.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Understand students’ cultures, interests, needs, and perspectives. People are shaped by their backgrounds. Respecting students means respecting their backgrounds, races, and cultures.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“Each person has something of value to contribute to the group, and the group is lessened without that contribution.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“•  Develop a growth mind-set.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“•  Accept that human differences are not only normal but also desirable.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes

“that teachers’ expectations about their students strongly affect how teachers treat these students in ways that create self-fulfilling prophesies. Students treated as if they were high achieving acted in high-achieving ways. Students treated as if they were low achieving performed as low achievers.”
― Leslie S. Kaplan, Culture Re-Boot: Reinvigorating School Culture to Improve Student Outcomes