School culture can be defined in different ways. The most common approach refers to the basic assumptions, values, norms, and artifacts that are shared by school members, which influence their functioning at school (Maslowski 2001). According to Schein (1985), there are three levels of school culture: basic assumptions, values, and artifacts and practices. School culture can be recognized as an internal variable which can be produced and influenced by its members. It becomes normative “glue” that binds the organization and determines its development, or stagnation. It is the process of building a reality that allows people to understand and see in the specific way the events, activities and different situations. It gives meaning and significance of the individual behavior. Culture is the personality of a specific organization, which distinguishes it from environment and allows to find itself in it (Schein, 1990).

In Poland, since 2000s, the interest of school culture as an object of theoretical and empirical study, has increased slowly but systematically (Adrjan 2003, 2011; Polak 2007; Dernowska & Tłuściak-Deliowska, 2015). Polish studies on school culture are conducted mainly according to qualitative research strategy oriented anthropologically. In this way, researchers try to identify the specificity of the particular school. It provides very interesting descriptions of everyday life in schools and their interpretation, but it makes very difficult to search for repeatability or to examine the relationship between school functioning and its effects. Just a few years ago, polish researchers started to explore the school culture in a quantitative way. In Western Europe (and in the USA), for many decades, (organizational) school culture has attracted attention from many researchers who have acknowledged that school characteristics are important determinants of school performance (e.g. Brookover 1955; Sarason 1971; Rutter et al. 1979; Maslowski 2001). There are many instruments which are aimed to measure different aspects or levels of school culture and school climate (e.g. School Culture Survey, Saphier & King, 1985; Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire, Hoy & Clover, 1986; School Values Inventory, Pang, 1996; School Culture Survey, Gruenert & Valentine, 1998; School Culture Inventory, Maslowski 2001).

Polish researchers can learn from the others, from the foreign collegues who have much more experiences in the field of research such “ephemeral” phenomenon as school culture seems to be.

The main purpose of our presentation is to discuss our research experiences against the european research perspective and to show some results of our latest study upon polish school culture and climate.

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