Working Together

I didn't travel much over our holiday break this year. Staying home allowed me to get some much-needed rest and even gave me some time to reconnect with some old friends that I had not spoken to in a while. Some of these old friends work in education as well and the overwhelming theme that I heard from them was about adults in their building that couldn't get along or made things difficult for one another. I joke with teachers all the time that sometimes I complain about adults the same way that they complain about students. (I'm sure teachers complain about me the same way students complain about teachers too!) Despite those complaints that we all make, I realized listening to them how blessed I am to work in a building where the adults work well together.

There has been quite a bit of study on school and organizational culture in the past few years and the resounding affirmation of those studies is this: How a staff interacts with one another is as important to student success as how teachers interact with students directly. Read that again and think about how big that is. Your interactions with the other adults in this building has just as much to do with achievement as your direct teaching in their classroom. Not even class size or curriculum materials has that large of an effect on student achievement. I've long believed that teenagers have a great ability to detect hypocrisy. They probably wake up in the morning looking for it. The fact that students are so impacted by teacher-to-teacher interactions reminded me of an old saying: "I can't hear what you're saying for seeing what you do." This seems to be all too true for school culture.

So welcome back to the start of a new semester. But more than that, thank you for what you do for our students, each other as educators and for our school culture as a whole. While only six teachers work with End-of-Course testing subjects, each of you makes an equal impact on student success through how you interact in our school. And personally, thanks for blessing me to be the guy that you sometimes complain about. Having a reference on what the other side looks like makes a world of difference.