I'm part of a committee in our school called "Roots & Culture." We help facilitate staff events and work to improve cross-departmental activities and relationships. Here are a few things we've done using technology to enhance our building's culture:
Staff Potluck
For years, our staff has come together before winter break to share heaps and heaps of food with each other. It's a glorious, wonderful day that my tastebuds spend 364 days looking forward to. In recent years, we've used a Google Sheet to help organize food sign-up (instead of "Oh, hey! Bring whatever you want!" and then we get 12 different spinach dips). It's great! We offer designations of roughly how many entrees, appetizers, and desserts we need, and people sign up accordingly:
We filter food and dishes in and out of the staff lounge throughout the day during our off periods, and the room is filled during all lunch hours with teachers enjoying each other's company. I even met someone new at this year's celebration!
Last year, someone suggested we find a way to label names on the dishes so we could ask others for recipes. The LRC Director on the committee created a Google Slides presentation for people to add photos, recipes, and names--a great way to share!
Battle of the Books!
This wasn't a Roots & Culture endeavor; rather, our National English Honor Society students helped organize a "Battle of the Books" to coincide with March Madness. I borrowed the idea from a SAMR Camp session last year run by @spartanlynne from Granger Middle School. Inspired by her March Madness book celebration in the LRC, we posted some brackets on our English bulletin board and a committee of NEHSers picked 16 novels popular among their peers:
Using Google Forms, we created a quick survey to share with the English classes and LRC staff at our school. By the end, we were looking at about 300 votes per round! Much dissent followed Round 1 of voting, particularly from some feisty English teachers who were highly displeased that The Lightning Thief beat I'll Give You The Sun.
A few weeks and four rounds of voting later, we had our highly controversial champion: The Hunger Games. Yup, that's right: The Hunger Games defeated Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in the championship round. Scandalous!
Roots & Culture is currently in the midst of hosting a two-week Photo Hunt among staff members. After a harrowing March, we wanted to build some enthusiasm and camaraderie as we returned from spring break. Again--technology to the rescue!
We brainstormed 16 different photo/video "tasks" for staff to complete and created the list on this Google Doc. We also created folders in Drive for each department; staff could upload their documentation into their respective folders.
We still have four days left of the challenge, but the results so far have been hilarious and inspiring! Lots of smiles, cross-department adventures, and school pride.
Building staff culture is SO important in student learning. I firmly believe that a staff that enjoys working with each other and takes pride in their work environment will model enthusiasm in their classrooms and see more buy-in from their students. Events woven into the school environment--like the potluck, photo hunt, and book battle--are subtle ways to help develop that culture. And anytime you can use technology to streamline those activities, you pounce on it :)
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