Formal and informal mentors try to help new teachers understand how the school culture functions and how it affects the teachers. Tradition and rituals can have a positive effect on the culture by giving everyone a sense of cohesiveness, community and compassion. These environments improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover.
People bring beliefs and values to their schools. When these people are persuasive, they change the minds of others in the school culture. Alternatively, the school culture can change the new teacher's beliefs and values. Beliefs and values that serve an emotional or practical function for the educators are less likely to change.
Negative school cultures can harm teachers with humanistic backgrounds by causing them to move from focusing on individual student needs to managing students and maintaining order. In toxic school cultures, schools socialize optimistic teachers until they share the same negative outlook as the rest of the school. Faculty lounges become places to vent and complain. Anyone who tries to look at situations positively receives social sanctions.
Schools with positive cultures commonly seek new ways they can improve the school. Areas of improvement include problem solving, teamwork, diversity, social justice, ethical decision making and technological implementation. Some schools are run by administrators and teachers who feel threatened and engage in practices designed to protect themselves. For example, teachers who lack confidence in their technological literacy resist technology implementation out of fear that the technology will make them appear less relevant as they struggle to use it effectively. This can create an overall culture of technology resistance. Schools that have performed successful experiments, such as providing teachers with increased pay for improved performance, are more likely to experiment in the future. Conversely, schools with many failed experiments are more likely to focus on tradition.
School culture usually influences student behavior in positive or negative ways. Cultures that demand that students achieve excellence in academics and that expect moral behavior will cause students to shift into these behavioral patterns. The ethics embodied in the school become the student's norm. Attitude toward student work influences how students view their own work. Schools that use student work as a form of assessment do not encourage students as much as schools that display student work and place importance in their work.