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Tag: School Culture

Taking Time for Self-Care Helps Everyone

Written by HES Marketing on . Posted in Professional Development & School Culture.

If you feel tired, irritable, apathetic, or forgetful, you may be showing signs of burning out. You are not alone; this year exhausted many teachers and administrators. Be aware that the negative feelings can create a downward spiral making it hard to motivate yourself to do activities that will help you feel better. Educators give a lot of themselves, sometimes to such a degree that they forget to schedule time for themselves.  At Harris Education Solution, we support educators doing amazing work to support students. We hope this list of self-care ideas inspires you to do something for yourself today.

This next part is for you if you are saying to yourself, “Sure, I would love some ‘me-time,’ but I don’t have time for it.” Set boundaries and sometimes say “no” to requests and invitations so you can say “yes” to more free time and less stress. A daily routine with positive habits can make a big difference in your mental, physical, and emotional health. You can start small and add a few habits that make you feel better. Below is a list of ideas to get you started. The list is organized by time commitment so that you can work up from your current routine.

Less than a Minute
  • Examine your thoughts and reframe any negative self-talk with a more positive perspective. Turn “I failed at something” into “I challenged myself and gave myself a learning opportunity.”
  • Give someone a long hug.
  • Breathe deeply.
  • Drink a glass of water.
  • Energize yourself with some quick exercises like running up the stairs or doing a few push-ups.
  • Adjust your posture and relax any tense muscles.
  • Smile or laugh to trick your brain into feeling happier.
  • Give someone a sincere compliment.
  • Light a candle or use an essential oil diffuser with a scent that you enjoy. Be aware that not everyone takes pleasure from the same fragrances, and oils can cause reactions for some people. Many schools have rules against using them in the school building.
  • Give yourself a hand massage while putting lotion on. 
Less than Twenty Minutes
  • Meditate.
  • Connect with your spiritual side.
  • Start or write in a gratitude journal.
  • Eat a healthy snack.
  • Take a power nap.
  • Organize a small area that has been bugging you. The space you inhabit affects your mood and improving it will bring a smile to your face.
  • Sit outside.
  • Buy or cut a bouquet of flowers for your home.
  • Replace a burnt-out lightbulb or do some other neglected chore to feel a sense of accomplishment.
  • Look at pictures from a happy time.
  • Dream about what you will do when you have more time and take one step towards making that happen.
  • Listen to your favorite music.
  • Cuddle with your pet or a loved one.
  • Write out and prioritize a to-do list. Look for responsibilities that you can delegate or eliminate. Remember to add and prioritize a self-care item to your list. 
An Hour or Two
  • Immerse yourself into singing, dancing, coloring, drawing, playing a musical instrument, or whatever creative activity calms you and induces a relaxed mental flow.
  • Enjoy a long bath or shower.
  • Get a massage.
  • Catch up on sleep by taking a nap, going to bed early, or sleeping in late. Getting enough sleep is critical to cognitive function, emotional regulation, and overall health.
  • Put away your cell phone and computer, or at least turn off notifications. These interruptions cause unnecessary stress.
  • Escape into a good story with a book or movie.
  • Moving your body has excellent health and mental benefits. Starting to exercise when you are out of the habit is hard, but the reward is worth it. Choose the workout routine that you enjoy most. It can be as simple as going for a walk. Consider asking a friend to be your workout partner to help keep you motivated.
  • Visit with a friend or family member who has a positive outlook and makes you laugh. If your relationships have withered from working too much, this is a great time to meet new people. Perhaps try volunteering, joining a club, or attending a place of worship. A good support network will help you through the toughest of times.
  • Get rid of excess clutter. Donate, sell, or throw away items that you have not used recently. Look to Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix for inspiration.
  • Plant a garden.
  • Go for a hike or bike ride away from the hustle of cars and people. Nature has restorative powers.
  • Do a hobby. If you don’t have a hobby, think of an activity you once enjoyed and or one that has sparked your curiosity. You can connect with enthusiasts on social media to help you get started.
  • Eat a special meal.
More than a Day
  • Take a vacation. Ideally, you can escape to your favorite place in the world. However, you don’t have to go anywhere to take a break. Just decide that for a few days you will postpone all possible responsibilities. Try to do some fun activities to make positive memories.
  • Some wounds are more profound and require more work to overcome. You might consider therapy to guide you through the healing process.
Make Self-Care a Habit

We hope you find encouragement in one or more of these suggestions and that you commit to doing one thing just for yourself every day. Taking time to nurture your mental, physical, and emotional health goes a long way toward rejuvenating your energy. You deserve to take time to de-stress for your own well-being. It is not an indulgent luxury; it is a basic human need. It has the bonus of benefiting everyone around you too. When you feel better, you will have more patience, laugh more, and connect better.

At Harris Education Solutions, we care about educators and hope to support them so they can enjoy long careers.

Ways to Improve Emotional Support for Teachers

Written by HES Marketing on . Posted in Professional Development & School Culture.

Teachers act as a frontline support system for students’ emotional needs. COVID-19 intensifies the emotional needs of students, which intensifies emotional stress for teachers. Many district leaders are looking for ways to increase their emotional support for teachers.

You are probably interested in supporting teachers emotionally because it is the right thing to do. Did you also know that emotionally supporting teachers has practical benefits as well? It promotes a positive district culture, improves student learning, and is cost-effective. 

District Culture

Improving trust and relationships among teachers and administrators is the first step towards creating a positive district culture. District leaders build confidence when they value and support their teachers. Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell, a leading authority on organizational culture from Harvard Graduate School of Education, said, “A culture will be strong or weak depending on the interactions between the people in the organization. In a strong culture, there are many, overlapping, and cohesive interactions among all members of the organization.” Simply put, district leaders who consistently interact with teachers will be in a better position to support them.

Student Learning

Experienced teachers positively influence student learning because they develop their skills over many years. Teachers who feel supported by their leaders are more likely to stay in their positions. Unfortunately, even before the pandemic, statistics showed that over 50% of teachers quit teaching before reaching retirement age. That attrition rate hurts students.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals describes how principals should not underestimate their role. According to the Wallace Foundation, principals rely on district leaders to provide resources and help. Research shows that even leaders as high in hierarchy as the superintendent impact student achievement.

Cost-Effective

Retaining teachers also saves the district money. The cost of recruiting, hiring, and training one new teacher typically ranges from $9,000 to $21,000. An urban district with 5,000 teachers could save five million dollars by reducing teacher attrition from 15 percent to 10 percent. Dedicating half of it to support teachers equals 2.5 million dollars. Dividing those resources among 5,000 teachers equals $500. $500 per teacher will provide a lot of supportive resources.

Respect, Listening, and Responding are Foundations for Emotional Support

We asked teachers across the US to describe how administrators are supporting them this year.

Some teachers gushed, “My administrators are the best! I don’t have enough superlatives to describe how they go above and beyond to help us teachers feel supported. I love my job.”

Others said, “My administrators are not helping at all. They make it worse. I am stressed beyond belief, and they keep piling on the work.” Emotionally supporting teachers requires respect. Micromanaging kills respect. Instead, empower teachers to play critical roles in decision making about how to achieve shared goals. Giving teachers agency fulfills their inherent desire to make a difference.

Another key to emotionally supporting teachers is listening and responding appropriately. Listening sounds easy, but not enough leaders intentionally incorporate listening into their day. The danger of not seeking input from everyone is that more vocal teachers will dominate what you hear. To get a balanced understanding, go into classrooms or call each teacher regularly. You will learn a lot from these informal conversations.

Crafting a response that values the teacher is hard too because leaders must confront their limitations. However, failure to listen and respond appropriately creates a chasm between teachers and district leaders.

One teacher wrote that teachers in her district told leaders they were suffering from work overload. The district responded with, “Take time for self-care,” but then added more meetings to the schedule. Luckily, most district leaders are more perceptive than that.

Support that Goes the Extra Mile

You may be looking for specifics for taking your emotional support to the next level. Teachers sang the praises of the administrators going above and beyond the norm. Read on for inspiration about outstanding teacher support that fell into four categories.

  1. Reducing Responsibilities and Granting Time Off
  2. Giving Gifts and Supplying Food
  3. Building Community
  4. Providing Technology Tools

Helping Teachers Fulfill their Responsibilities

Teachers feel overwhelmed and expressed how much they love getting time off from work to relax and recuperate. However, unless administrators also amended professional responsibilities, receiving time off felt disingenuous. After all, most teachers are already putting in more than their contract hours. As one teacher said, she doesn’t have “a work fairy.” Here are a few ways principals and district leaders lightened teachers’ loads.

  • Taking over recess/lunch duty
  • Making phone calls to students’ homes
  • Covering classes when a guest teacher isn’t available
  • Shortening and canceling meetings
  • Postponing professional development
  • Not requiring teachers to turn in lesson plans for review
  • Making one non-instructional day per week to allow for planning, collaboration, and communication
  • Streamlining the Educator Effectiveness Plan process

Giving Gifts and Supplying Food

Food and gifts show teachers that you care about them and build morale. Here are a few gestures from principals and district leaders that made teachers smile.

  • Organizing parents to bring meals to teachers
  • Buying gift cards for a restaurant
  • Catering staff meetings
  • Bringing coffee and doughnuts on Mondays
  • Stocking the staff lounge with grab-and-go snacks and drinks
  • Organizing meal delivery to teachers experiencing hardship
  • Giving door prizes at meetings where the lucky winner received a bottle of wine, a gift card, or a gift basket
  • Cash bonuses or raises
  • Adding an ergonomic chair to every classroom
  • Giving token gifts such as a meditation app, hand sanitizer, lotion, masks, a book of inspirational quotes
  • Adding a teacher’s calming corner, complete with a massage chair, in the teacher’s lounge

Community Building

Teachers often feel isolated from peers. Principals improve camaraderie and innovation with community building. Teachers like the following ideas.

  • Relaxing the dress code
  • Book clubs
  • Throwing eggs at a big sign saying “COVID”
  • Putting a blank poster outside the door of staff members and encouraging everyone to write uplifting words and praise
  • Virtual game nights like Bingo and Trivia with small prizes
  • Starting each meeting with a quick icebreaker
  • Scavenger hunts
  • Creating a book with a page dedicated to each staff member, showing what makes that staff member special

Providing Appropriate Technology Tools

Social distancing required teachers to adopt technology at warp speed. Unfortunately, many teachers spend their personal money to equip themselves and students with the proper EdTech tools. Districts support their teachers emotionally by supplying improved software and hardware to teach efficiently. Here is a list of some of the tech tools teachers appreciate.

  • Microphones, document cameras, monitor lights, tablets
  • Communication platforms
  • Access to an easy to use and robust Learning Management System
  • A discretionary budget for learning apps and subscriptions
  • Digital collaboration tools
  • Curriculum software that includes automatic grading and data collection.

As leaders, you may follow the philosophy of the French statesman, Andre Malraux, who said, “To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.” At Harris Education Solutions, we want to help you honor and support our community heroes-teachers.

Recognizing and Exiting Survival Mode in Education

Written by HES Marketing on . Posted in Professional Development & School Culture.

Your family is enjoying a lovely picnic in the park. Suddenly, the wind picks up embers from another family’s barbecue, and sparks fly to dry grass near you. Everyone drops their food and runs over to stomp out the flames. You extinguish all the blazes, narrowly averting a wildfire. Unfortunately, the food is ruined, the grass is scorched, and your family is stressed.  

That scenario exemplifies going into survival mode to manage a crisis. You jump into action. You don’t pause to discuss fire science. When the fire is out, you clean up the mess and get new food for your hungry family. 

Survival mode is necessary to mitigate damage during a crisis. You must make tough decisions and follow through rapidly. The pandemic put many, if not all districts, in survival mode. At edInsight, we appreciate your decisive action to educate students safely. We are here to support your ability to make wise decisions.  

Most of our recent blogs focus on tips about educating during the time of COVID. This blog encourages you to consider the future as you transition out of survival mode into repairing the damage incurred. Survival mode is not a natural place for visionary leaders. Since you are reading a blog about creating future success, consider yourself a visionary leader.  

Pandemic Damage 

Everyone is stressed by constant changes and a lack of control. School-level educators are drowning from work overload trying to meet all their students’ needs and fulfill other expectations. A teacher posted to her friends, “There is nothing quite like the nauseating sting of anxiety from muddling through one monumental task, then sifting through the pages of emails you didn’t have time to take care of only to find out that you’re even further away from catching up. I give up… for today.”   

Parents are pulling their kids out of the public school system at alarming rates, stretching thin budgets even more. At least some parents chose to leave because they worried about their children struggling academically and socially. Parents of children with previously existing academic challenges were especially frustrated by their distance learning experience in the spring. EdChoice published a report detailing parental concerns by demographic data. 

Distance learning exposed weaknesses for the most vulnerable populations. Even teachers doing face-to-face instruction had to change their typical methodologies to enforce social distancing practices. Teachers are reporting that more students have more significant learning gaps than ever before. A high school teacher with many Title 1 students said that fifty percent of her students are failing. A fifth-grade distance-learning teacher lamented about a depressingly low student engagement. Another teacher admitted that she feels disconnected from her students and doesn’t have a firm grasp of what students know.  

It is up to district leaders to provide these dedicated educators with the tools they need to do their job well. 

Recognizing and Exiting Survival Mode 

While quick decisions and actions are necessary during a crisis, it comes at a cost. Some people call survival mode “slow death mode” because it is a downhill slide into reactionary management. Focusing on disaster mitigation leaves precious little energy and resources for repairing damage, systematic planning, and creating a culture of improvement.  

Teams in survival mode often exhibit the following traits: 

  • Not investing in systems and training 
  • Spending most of the time reacting to urgent situations  
  • Ignoring issues previously considered a high priority 
  • Overwhelming exhaustion and stress
  • Not tracking success indicators 

When a crisis lasts for a long time, such as the pandemic, teams must be careful not to become stuck in a reactionary mode rather than a proactive mode. The lack of a systemic approach to management and resource allocation eventually puts students’ future academic growth in jeopardy.  

Experts warn that pivoting out of survival mode is a gradual and intentional process. Some members of your team may be resistant to the change. Perhaps they think survival mode is still necessary or they feel energized in times of crisis. Listen to their concerns and value their skillsets because their energy and insights are valuable.  

However, as a visionary, people are relying on your talent for seeing a path toward a successful future. 

The Impact of Survival Mode on MTSS  

If your district’s Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) deteriorated in survival mode, you are not alone. Implementing a robust MTSS system requires district leaders to analyze and plan carefully. Districts that invested in MTSS before the pandemic avoided much of the damage, but no one remained unscathed. 

If your district did not have a strong MTSS before the pandemic, it will need one after. The sooner your team starts implementing MTSS measures, the better for student outcomes. 

MTSS improves student achievement, closes learning gaps, and supports teachers. It focuses educators on the highest priority needs, increasing effectiveness and reducing stress.  

Repairing MTSS Requires Data  

As you transition out of survival mode, you need to know where students and teachers need support to create a road map to achieve desired student learning outcomes. Start by gathering pertinent data and analyzing it carefully. A comprehensive data dashboard makes those tasks much quicker and easier.  

Teachers teach most effectively when they quickly and easily see students’ growth. School administrators implement MTSS with Fidelity when they track student progress for large groups, sub-groups, and individuals. The ability to track progress gives administrators valuable information about which interventions to prioritize. A data dashboard provides teachers with specific information for improved communication with parents and students about progress and the next steps. Clear directives are vital to empower stakeholders to act towards the goal of every student meeting standards. 

edInsight Supports MTSS and Future Success 

Most people think of edInsight as merely a data dashboard. While our data dashboard is an incredible productivity tool, we are so much more. Our trainers go beyond teaching how to use the software; they coach how to think of data in new ways. You choose the criteria and benchmarks to support your specific MTSS approach. Every aspect is customizable. 

The software provides a way to include informal teacher assessments and formal district assessments in data analysis. It reduces teacher workload because they enter assessments directly into the system. The district software connects to the edInsight data warehouse, automating reporting and analysis.  

When your district is ready to plan for success, our products make an excellent investment in student growth. Say good-bye to trying to make sense of piles of paperwork and lost folders. Say hello to data-driven collaborative decision-making. 

Click here to learn more about how our team can help convert your vision into reality.