The following guest post is written by Barbara R. Blackburn and Ron Williamson, Eye On Education's best-selling authors of Rigorous Schools and Classrooms: Leading the Way.

As a school leader, how can you shape the culture of your school to help increase the level of rigor? The culture of a school is a powerful tool for shaping the behavior of those who work there because it reflects the important values and underlying assumptions of that school.

Understanding culture is critical for educational leaders. Culture reflects the unspoken norms about schools, their purpose, and their organization and is reflected in the assumptions people hold about students, their learning, and the rigor of the instructional program. Culture is a powerful set of rituals, traditions, and practices that are often transmitted without question from generation to generation.

There are four key indicators of a school's culture:
Adapted from Bolman & Deal, 2003; Peterson & Deal, 2002.

Rituals and Ceremonies provide structure to our daily lives and to the routine of a school. Rituals occur rather routinely while ceremonies are grander, less frequent events (e.g., graduation). Both rituals and ceremonies reflect values in their structures and their priorities, and they carry meaning about what is valued and what is important.

Heroes and Heroines are those people who are looked up to as reflecting the organization’s values, people who are examples of living the values.

Stories and Tales are those recollections of events that are told and retold and that play a powerful role in sharing examples of organizational values. Stories often contain a moral and are inevitably engaging.

Rewards and Reinforcements reflect those things that are valued and therefore rewarded. Does your school value creativity in the classroom or compliance with established patterns? Does it value waiving a rule so that a student may be successful, or adhering to established policy?

Let’s look at a couple of strategies you can use to impact these areas of your school's culture. Effective schools share turnaround stories, those of students who have thrived despite challenges.  You can share stories of a student who has been labeled as a low-performing student or who has made major progress within the school, or of a teacher or staff member who has made a difference to students. Those stories create heroes and heroines and help shift perspectives from negative to positive.

Another easy idea is to use a Recognizing Rigor Certificate to reward teachers who are implementing rigorous strategies. Keep several certificates with you at all times, and freely distribute them when you see a teacher ratcheting up the rigor in his or her classroom. Also, keep a supply near teachers’ mailboxes and encourage them to recognize each other.  These simple strategies, used consistently, will help you move further on the road to rigor!