Students are tired of being told repeatedly how important it is to get involved in their school community. Teachers can preach and preach, but at the end of the day students aren’t going to buy into your school spirit aspirations if they don’t see their mentors doing the same.
Minga spoke with Dr. Small, the Assistant Principal of a middle school in Florida and she shared the single week that helped her school turn a corner in terms of engagement.
“Initially we had realized that our teachers were taking a beating from remote-teaching with COVID, and we wanted to do something to give our team a boost of energy to keep on pushing through.” She says, after we asked her where the idea actually came from. “But in the early idea phase, we mentioned it to a few of our senior students and they were the ones that said ‘that would be really amazing to see as a student at this school’, and the idea took off from there.”
Dr. Small’s team then set out to execute the first ever TEACHER SPIRIT WEEK at their school. “It was surprisingly similar to what we would do for students, but instead, it was the teachers we told to dress up for different themes each day” she explains then admitted with a laugh, “I won’t lie, the prizes teachers could win for participating were a bit more adult themed.”
At the end of our chat we asked the obvious question – “Do you think this could be an annual occurrence?”
“Hmm… We actually haven’t talked about that” she said after thinking a moment. “If I had to guess, considering how much fun we had and the effect we saw our enjoyment have on our students, making it an annual occurrence is probably the right way to go.”
What do you think? Is it important for a school’s staff to have THEIR OWN spirit week?
Stay tuned for a part 2 coming soon with ideas for teacher spirit week activities!
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