Building and maintaining school culture is something I'm passion about and within my instructional coaching role I feel a personal responsibility to be a part of this work. I am fortunate that our other building instructional leaders also sees this as a priority. I get a lot of great ideas for this on Twitter and the Principal Principles Facebook Group.
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| Door Hanger Snack Delivery |
Snacks/Food- One of the ways that we promote community and positive culture is sharing one another's company over snacks and food. That might look like a snack cart delivery during the first week back to school, a caramel apple bar for a morning PD snack, a staff pot luck on a PD day, ice cream floats for an afternoon snack after PD, smoothie/yogurt bar the morning of conferences, occasional Bagel Fairy drop ins (in the morning), chocolate at team meetings, or snacks brought to week long professional development sessions in Chicago.
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| Rockstar Awards I Have Received |
Rockstar Awards- These are a way to recognize and appreciate one another as a part of our staff and are handed out at the beginning of staff meetings. I have been the fortunate recipient of many of these, as well as I have handed out dozens of rocks to colleagues appreciating them for their support, the risks they've taken, or how they've challenged me. I am really grateful to be surrounded by such incredible people!
Emphasis on Strengths- Everyone in our building has taken the StrengthsFinder assessment and each year we revisit our collaborative structures to review one another's strengths and decide on the best use of leveraging strengths on the collaborative teams that we are a part of. This also turned into a "user manual" that we have filled out in an effort to share things about ourselves in an attempt to better understand the people that we are working with.
Languages of Appreciation- One year in an attempt to build staff culture, we all took a
language of appreciation assessment and shared the results back to recognize how we could best support and appreciate one another.
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| Colleague Created Wordle |
Notes of Affirmation/Cards at Staff Meetings- One activity that we did as a team is that we had affirmation card bags, and dropped in notes on a note card affirming our appreciation for one another. These were set up in a conference room and we had a week to do this. Any bags that were a bit short of cards, we went ahead and wrote some extra cards to make sure that everyone was well represented. We have also done appreciation cards at the beginning of staff meetings that we have then placed in colleagues mail boxes.
Wordles- One of the activities that we did this year leading up to valentines day was identified 3 words to describe staff members and submitted them in a Google Form. Then, one of our administrative assistants went ahead and created the Wordle for us that was laminated for us to showcase in our rooms.
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| Jelly Belly - Team Taste Testing Flavor Challenge |
Jelly Belly Taste Testing Challenge- We had a staff meeting coming up right before teacher appreciation week and I wanted to do something fun to appreciate staff and had just driven past the exit to the Jelly Belly Factory. I made a special stop and figured I could have them on the tables for during the staff meeting. That idea got bigger and turned into doing a taste testing challenge to see which table teams could guess the most flavors correct. It took a very short amount of time to prep and a few minutes to implement to kick off a staff meeting and was well worth the laughs!
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