10 ways we made our school happier

We have one faculty meeting a month, and they’re all about team-building. The nuts and bolts of scheduling go in a newsletter that I send out every week. Even there, I’ll include inspirational videos or something that touched my heart and I think will touch theirs. I keep the conversation going by asking, “If you do this with your kids, let me know their responses.”

Every faculty meeting is organized around our mindset of the month. The PLE team comes up with a team-building activity that does three things:

1. Connects with their hearts
2. Connects them to the mindset
3. Is simple to take back into their classroom with pretty much no thought.

When they’re having an issue in the classroom, we want them to remember and say, “This is the perfect moment for us to do what we did in the faculty meeting, where we took a fear, wrote it on a piece of paper, then wadded it up and threw it in the trashcan.”

If you connect with their hearts…

Around the school, we do everything from painting hallways and offices crazy colors to having staff surprises. (You can see what I mean in this video.) If there’s a heaviness in the air, we’ll get chicken biscuits or Krispy Kreme donuts and surprise the staff. During flu season, we pass out Bath and Body Works hand sanitizers. The key to that isn’t sending out a staff email saying there’s hand sanitizer in the work room; we hand-deliver these little treats as much as possible. That way, our teachers can say to themselves, “It’s important enough to my administration that they put this in my hand.” Those are all deposits in the heart that help them feel appreciated, valued, and cared about.

To us, happiness is about taking the time to understand what each educator is passionate about and how they can become a positive influence on others. For example, one of my special ed teachers has a passion for art. She and I were talking one day, and I suggested that she create a segment in her day where she could pull kids in and do art projects. So she did an art therapy class where students got to choose from sculpting, water colors, or just coloring, and it was a huge success.

…Their minds will follow

According to a recent Harvard study, happiness positively affects students’ GPAs, and John Hattie’s research says that a successful social-emotional learning program can add as much as a year’s growth per year.

We’ve seen a direct correlation between talking about growth mindset and higher test scores, but to me, the clearest sign that the mindsets lessons are reaching our students is that we’ve seen a big decrease in Monday tardies. Our tardy bell rings at 7:40, and now kids want to be here, because our mindset lessons start at 7:40. They don’t want to miss them, because they love them.

Our schoolwide theme for next year is “We Are Connected.” Our PLE committee is considering ideas like adopting another school, but they’re not making the final decision—and I’m not making the final decision, either. They’ll take ideas to their grade levels and we’ll figure it out as a school, because we’re all happiest when we’re working together.