How Do You Support Your Teaching Staff?
Part II- Recognition
Good day! I’m writing to you all from our nation’s capital for the much anticipated Part II of our supporting teaching staff articles. Realizing this could honestly be a several part series, I’ll be proactive in saying Part II will not conclude the series.
A quick reiteration. While these strategies are effective for teachers and schools, they are incredibly effective for any organization whether they be non-profit, for profit or otherwise. Creating a happy and thriving organization is one that not only provides recognition from supervisors, but provides peer to peer recognition in an honest and genuine way. This article will demonstrate only one method for achieving both aforementioned manners of recognition; jump in, it’s a really effective one. 🙂
The Foundations of Organizational Culture
Organizational culture is something I feel adamant about and could easily be the topic of an entire book. While I’ll elaborate immensely on these topics not only within future articles, future publications and hopefully in book form, I’ll be brief here.
Any organization should be definitively clear about the key characteristics that embody the spirit of who they are. Who are you all? What traits define your work? Have you all ever asked that or sat down and figured it out?
Southwest Airlines organization culture is pretty crystal clear: “recognition, appreciation and celebration.” These three characteristics define everything that they do, guide what data is important to them and how they measure success. If your school, school district or charter organization hasn’t defined these traits, I wouldn’t rush it. Sit down, round table style, with key stakeholders (teachers, admin, parents, staff etc.) and start boiling down who you all are, what is important to you and how you will guide all that you do.
For the El Paso Leadership Academy these five key skills are: Collaboration, Responsibility, Smarts (e.g. critical thinking, creative problem solving, & adaptability), Humility and Hunger. It spells CRSHH and pronounced Crush, as in, that student just crushed it by leading exemplary group work. These aren’t so much characteristics (although they define who we are) as much as they are the highly saud after “soft skills” all employers wish their employees had. They are skills I’ve found it almost impossible to find any college or even graduate program focused on teaching.
The trick is for teachers to teach CRSHH to students thereby learning the depths of these characteristics throughout the process themselves. Neat trick right? Best way to learn something is to be responsible for teaching it. With students learning the skills, teachers teaching and embodying them, it’s imperative that admin and staff exemplify the characteristics through professional developments, and more importantly, in their day to day actions.
CRSHH Assemblies
One of our favorite practices are weekly CRSHH assemblies with students. The students gather in Benitez Hall by respective grade level (e.g. 6th grade at 2:00 pm, 7th grade at 2:45 when 6th grade finishes etc.) and teachers prepare a slide show and presentation to celebrate a student that exemplified one, a few or sometimes all the CRSHH traits in an exemplary manner within the previous several weeks.
The teachers have photo documentation of the student exhibiting the traits, have incredibly detailed stories/anecdotes of where they witnessed the student excelling in these specific key traits and present them all with music in a very fun slide show in front of the grade level. The beauty of this level of recognition is that every student is capable of demonstrating/learning these skills. This is not just about grades and attendance, it’s about a learned skill set that all can find success with. I can absolutely go into much greater detail about our CRSHH Assemblies if you all are interested. Just let me know.
Teacher/Staff Recognition
EPLA replicates the CRSHH ceremony that we do with students, for one teacher and one staff member each month. While we forgo gathering the entire student population, we gather all teachers, staff and admin on a select Friday of the month, after school to conduct the ceremony. It’s an awesome ritual.
What’s our process?
The admin examines the CRSHH values and chooses someone they believe has truly demonstrated them over the past month. When they choose a person, this person is kept anonymous to everyone except the admin. Then each administrator is assigned one letter/trait to discuss about the award recipient (e.g. one admin takes collaboration, a different admin will take responsibility etc.).
That administrator will then prepare a discussion or story (stories are better) that demonstrates how this teacher or staff member demonstrated, say “collaboration,” in a highly detailed way and how it directly benefited their colleagues and the organization as whole. Then the next administrator presents “responsibility” in the same fashion. If there are photos, even better.
Tip: Details matter! Generalities and idioms are boring and have zero impact. Use specifics and story telling to truly inspire, entertain and give real recognition to your staff.
What’s most fun is that the teachers and staff do not know who is being recognized until the end! It’s like an unveiling! The stories and anecdotes may give a hint as to who is being recognized, but the fun is in the “guessing game.” The trick here is to use vague pronouns like “they” vs. him or her, or “this person” vs. their name.
At the end, the administration reveals the individual, gives them a gift (in our case a teacher CRSHH T-shirt that we spend quite a bit of time on designing and is unique only the CRSHH winners and a coffee gift card) and recognizes them in front of their colleagues. Then teachers and staff are allowed to do a full round of “appreciations” for the recipient to discuss how the recipient helped them in the last month. This exact practice is actually how we end every single teacher/staff meeting.
We stand in a circle and we open it up for everyone to share “appreciations.” Anyone is free to discuss how a fellow colleague provided an assist or help within the last month allowing everyone to hear how the “colectivo” (the collective) supports one another. At the end of appreciations, we end the circle with the ritualistic clap of the United Farm Workers.
I’ve been a part of “teacher of the month” ceremonies before and, I have to admit, they’re a bit tedious, boring and miss the entire component of the teachers recognizing and supporting one another. This ceremony is much more intimate, participatory and fun. The key is to keep it small. If you’re at a huge school or the department is large, try to break it down by grade level or into smaller sections so there’s no more than about 30–40 folks gathering. When there’s 100 teachers all crammed together in an auditorium it loses its feeling of community and union.
Until next time, please chime in with your thoughts, comments, suggestions for future articles and questions. Thanks for stopping by. -Omar Yanar
