Don't Overlook What's Actually Working in Your School Right Now

When things are hard, it’s easy to let the difficult parts of the work take up all the space in the conversation. The burnout is real. The staffing challenges are real. The expanding scope of what schools are being asked to do is real.

But I want to make a case for paying equal attention to what’s working. Because something significant is working, and if we’re not naming it and building on it, we’re leaving some of the most powerful culture work off the table.

Teachers right now feel strongly connected to their purpose. The sense that their work matters is remarkably resilient, even through the hardest stretches of the year. They feel connected to their growth, they see themselves learning, and they feel like they belong to something when they’re surrounded by their colleagues.

Those are not small things. Purpose and belonging are the load-bearing walls of a school culture. When they’re strong, everything else is survivable. When they’re absent, no amount of programming can replace them.

What I see in the strongest school cultures is that leaders don’t take those strengths for granted. They actively name them. They find the moments in staff meetings to say: I watched what you did with that student this week and it reminded me exactly why we’re all here. They write the morning message that connects a specific classroom moment to the larger mission of the school.

Purpose doesn’t sustain itself automatically. It gets sustained by leaders who keep pointing to it, week after week, with enough specificity that teachers can see themselves in the story.

If your teachers are still showing up committed and connected to the work, even in a hard year, that’s worth naming. You don’t have to wait until things are broken to build on what’s strong.