Car lines can be difficult to plan, manage, and improve. Join our 30-minute session where we will provide tangible tips to help create a great car line experience!
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Miami-Dade County School Administrators, we’ve got a demo JUST for you! Join Possip on Wednesday, July 27th from 2:00 – 2:30 PM ET to see if Possip is a good fit for your schools or districts!
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Possip looks to explore ways in which we can assist Communication Professionals during this 30-minute session on July 26th, from 11 AM CT – 11:30 AM CT.
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Virginia Williams, Possip reporter with a background in Elementary Education & Special Education from Raleigh, NC, gives school leaders ideas for tackling COVID this upcoming school year.
COVID has now been impacting our students, staff and families for three school years! Throughout that time, countless messages have been shared with school communities about how to prevent the spread of COVID, what to do after an exposure (what is considered “exposure”?), what to do if you have COVID, what to do if you’re sick and it’s not COVID…and the list goes on and on. With the ever-changing COVID landscape, it is just as important as ever to communicate early, often and CLEARLY with families.
Below are some guidelines that will help you do just that.
Make sure families know where/when/how information related to COVID will be shared with them. Do they need to join a text messaging system? Do they need to ensure that their email address is included on a mailing list? Is there a page on your school website they should check regularly? Who should they contact if they have questions? Should they notify the school of exposures or infections? If so, how?
Don’t wait until you have a student or staff member infected with COVID to share your protocols with your community! Share as much information as you can upfront. Make sure families and staff know what to expect in a variety of scenarios so that if/when positive cases do occur, there are no surprises in terms of your school’s response. Additionally, share any changes & updates in a timely manner. Most importantly, when possible, share the rationale behind your decision-making. We know there are many varying opinions and feelings about Covid and how to respond. It may be helpful to cite the medical experts and/or district leaders who are supporting and guiding your school as you make decisions about lifting, maintaining or changing safety measures.
Create a COVID response team or designate a point person to lead the communication efforts. This will ensure consistency in how protocols/updates are communicated and will make it easy for families to reach out with questions or concerns.
We know the thought of another pandemic school year is exhausting, but we also know that you can set your school up for success throughout trying times by having a clear plan in place and sharing that plan with your community. We hope these tips help you in doing that!
The post COVID Safety Measures: Top Trend #2 appeared first on Possip | Engagement Platform | School Feedback App.
Calling all Arkansas School Admin – we would love for you to join us for a brief, 30-minute, dive into Possip’s services at 11 AM CT / 12 PM ET! Register today!
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Adam Thede, reporter and tech lead at Possip, presents great ways to support principals
Supporting teachers is important this time of year – but so is principal support. I remember a line from Superman when I was a kid. Superman has just caught Lois Lane from a falling building.
Superman: Easy, miss. I’ve got you.
Lois Lane: You, you‘ve got me? Who’s got you?
As I think about what the school year is like for principals, this is the question that comes to mind. Principals are to support teachers – but who supports principals?
The principal job is hard. My empathy extends to principals. This is probably because when I met my husband he was starting a school and a principal. I have watched all of the challenges he has to tackle.
We recently were sharing about Possip with a community – and we were shocked to hear people say, “it’s interesting that you all talk about empathizing with principals. No one empathizes with principals.”
I could probably spend an entire post musing on what psychological and sociological drivers might lead us to undervalue and underappreciate principals. That’s not for this post.
So we know that principals are caring for everyone else – students, parents, teachers, district administrators. Who gives the principal support they need? And how do principals make it through this time of year when you are struggling?
And read some of these reflections on what a good principal is here. Remind yourself that whatever else is going on, you are a good principal – and you can support principals…even if the principal is you!
One last note before we go. One way to support principals is to support your people. Keeping too much negative parallel processing from happening is important. Parallel processing in organizations is described here.
“parallel processes occur when one team projects elements of its condition onto the other, and the other absorbs what is projected.” https://gothamculture.com/2017/05/25/can-parallel-processes-solve-organizational-problems
Schools are ripe with parallel processing – and principals are ripe for being a key part of it. Principals are both receiving conditions that exist within their school system and district or that are being created elsewhere. Principals can risk pushing that culture down. So if they are feeling pressure from the central office, they may unintentionally push that down onto their teachers, who may push that down onto students.
Conversely, we know that teachers can be parallel processing the trauma their students come into school with: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/09/helping-teachers-manage-weight-trauma. As this Harvard article shares, “Teachers, counselors, and administrators may recognize the cumulative stressors that they face, but they don’t always realize that their symptoms are a common reaction to working with traumatized children — and that these symptoms have a name.”
Principals can play a critical role in helping diffuse any unhealthy habits no matter which direction they come. Principals can be a filter or gate for anything coming from the top on down from a board or central office. Or principals can be a mirror or reflection for anything that is coming upward from students or teachers or parents.
The post Principal Support This Season: 7 Ideas appeared first on Possip | Engagement Platform | School Feedback App.
As Possip Founder, CEO, and a parent of a student- Shani Dowell shares what the first day of school is really like.
On Facebook and Instagram they look like cute pictures of kids, impressive classrooms, and beautiful libraries.
The reality is crying kids at drop off and buses running late. The truth is a lot of first year teachers, class scheduling snafus, and kids worrying about their clothes. There’s more! Parents worrying about whether their kid is okay, and districts worrying about buses and transportation. We’re not done yet! Schools have to figure out who is showing up – fewer kids than expected? More kids than expected?
Beneath the beauty of cute kids and perfect classrooms is the messiness of the art and science of running great schools. All the cuteness and preparedness is real; but a little bit of chaos is too.
Our only solution for this messiness is a community of wisdom and grace.
At Possip we see the praise and feedback that highlights both how hard the first weeks of school are – -and the beauties in the first weeks of school.
We want to remind teachers, parents, and school staff that – as we tell our kids who may be tentatively entering school for the first time – you’re good!
As most parents know, these two words are spoken more as a vision and prayer than anything – we are speaking over our kids that they are going to be okay.
Similarly, just remember that in spite of hiccups in the first days or maybe even week of school, YOU’RE GOOD! Your child, your classroom, your school is going to have a great year.
Luckily, the school year echoes the Winston Churchill quote – success is not final; failure is not fatal; is the courage to continue that counts.
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Possip Reporter and Tennessee AP teacher, Savannah Staley, discusses trends in bullying and student discipline.
Parents, students and staff tell us the negative effects of bullying – low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. As the world goes more virtual, bullying is harder to spot, report, and stop. Still bullying and student discipline are top priorities for educators, administrators, and families alike.
In fact, in our Pulse Checks
the past school year, bullying and student discipline was one of the top trends across students, parents, and school staff. This is unique.
Here are some tips for addressing bullying, restoring student relationships, and building a positive school culture.
When we promote a culture of safety, students feel more freedom to learn, explore, and express themselves. Safety is itself, somewhat subjective. So we need to ask ourselves, safe for who? The goal is not to control students, or to put extreme limitations on their autonomy, but they should feel safe. This means a proactive (rather than reactive) approach to managing bullying and student discipline. You can promote a culture of safety by:
Stopping bullying is important – but not your full aspiration for a great school culture. A safe space without bullying is the floor. You want to go higher – and that includes authentically healing the relationship. Bullying is the result of insecurity, trauma, and pain. So it’s not enough to simply address the behavior. You want to uncover the why underneath. By practicing and modeling restorative practices, you can co-create a culture of healing and trust. Here are some examples of restorative practices.
It’s tough to get everyone on the same page. When we invite others into the conversation, there’s often more engagement and support. Consider inviting teachers, families, and perhaps even students, into a conversation regarding your school discipline model. Once you have that discipline model in place, stick to it!
This is easier said than done. Still, it is one of the most important ways to prevent bullying or support students going through it. When you’re familiar with your students, you’re more likely to notice abnormalities. Additionally, when students feel known, they often also feel safe to confide in trusted adults. When teaching, students sometimes didn’t want to be grouped together. These reasons weren’t always big enough for me to reconsider my grouping. But sometimes they were. You want to create a culture of trust. At the same time, you want to support students who are learning to trust themselves. As educators, it’s our responsibility to listen and honor these boundaries.
There’s not one one clear way to prevent bullying. When we work together as a team and prioritize student safety and vulnerability, we make our schools stronger for everyone.
The post Bullying and Student Discipline Solutions: Trend #3 appeared first on Possip | Engagement Platform | School Feedback App.
Possip Reporter and Tennessee AP teacher, Savannah Staley, has provided us with solutions for your curriculum!
Curriculum Feedback was in the Top 5 feedback trends that parents shared with schools and districts over the 2021-2022 school year.
Parents care about what their kids learn – and how they learn it. They have opinions and ideas as well. Teachers are experts on what they teach, how they teach it, and why their subject matters.
How can schools help parents learn about – and give input to – what their kids learn? How can teachers and districts share their knowledge and expertise?
We’ve got some tips!
Parents should know that what their child’s school or district teaches, and why they teach it. What is taught varies widely across the United States. As a Texas middle schooler I had a year of Texas History in 7th grade. Surely none of the other 49 states offer Texas history :).
Though news outlets are national – what is taught and how it is taught is very local. Sometimes parents assume their child’s school is teaching something that may – in actuality – not be taught.
Therefore, when schools and districts don’t give parents information – they are left to fill in the gaps. While in the past, many students came home with textbooks that parents could use as a guide or understanding of what their child was learning, that’s rarely the case now.
Some best practices in giving parents information include:
Another particularly helpful item for parents of high schoolers: give parents a syllabus or map for what their child will learn over the course of the year.
Sometimes it’s hard to provide a lot of detail – but even sending parents information with links to the standards their child will be learning can be helpful. Put this information in multiple places – your Facebook page, School websites, District websites, and as a standing corner in your routine newsletters.
Especially depending on the age, parents are curious about what their child is reading. Parents have different levels of comfort with some material – and even more so if they are caught off guard with questions their child may ask them. The more you can give them information about the books that will be read up front, the better opportunities they will have to share any questions, connections, or ideas about the book list. For more on why it’s important to engage parents with their children’s reading, click here.
Share the name of the curriculum you are using – and if the curriculum is teacher or school-created, let parents know that. Parents may want to look up the curriculum to learn more.
Give parents information about how they can best remediate or accelerate at home. Parents don’t always expect the school to provide every opportunity for their child to get additional support. However, without information about what their child is learning or should know, it’s hard for parents to find opportunities to support their child with additional supports.
Teachers could create a 2-5 minute video talking through what kids will learn in their class this year, how they will learn it, and what role parents can play in helping their child learn. Particularly during the pandemic virtual schooling era teachers did great videos showing parents what their child was learning, so that parents could support them as well.
It’s always best to give information when you also know information, and learn from parents. What do they care about? What would they like to see their children learn? Additionally, how would they like to see their children learn? What assets or expertise might parents have to offer to your curriculum and learning environment? By knowing and understanding what your parent community wants to see in the curriculum, you can best know what to communicate to them about – and how you can adjust your curriculum expectations.
The post Solutions for Curriculum: Top Trend #5 appeared first on Possip | Engagement Platform | School Feedback App.
Your school and district staff have a unique “pulse” on your school community, so giving them an outlet to share feedback and praise can give you, as a leader, a better sense of the community you lead.
Dr. Diarese George, the founder and executive director of the TN Educators of Color Alliance (TECA), is well aware of this, which is part of the reason he created TECA. TECA connects Tennessee’s educators of color to education policy and leadership opportunities, in addition to each other. Its mission is “to amplify the voice, presence, and support for educators of color while remaining teacher-led, student-centered, and solutions-oriented.”
A major part of amplifying voices is creating space for people to be heard, which is why TECA partnered with Possip during the 21-22′ school year. During our Possip Partner Retreat, Dr. George sat on a panel about elevating staff voice, read his Q&A on the importance of staff voice below!
Dr. George: In the education space, beyond students, staff voice is probably the next thing that you want to lean in on, especially when you think about leaders and organizations. Sometimes they (school leaders) can be removed more from the day-to-day things that take place so staff voice is extremely important to be able to get a sense of what’s happening on the ground in spaces within schools.
Hearing staff voice also allows you to be able to pivot, and make adjustments, to ensure that staff are supported, healthy and valued, and to make sure things stay functional.
Dr. George: I’m a former educator myself. I’ve worked in higher-ed. I also taught for six years, and then worked as an administrator and ed-prep provider–training people to be teachers. So I’ve seen it from different angles. For TECA, our work is to support educators of color to stay in the education space and then leverage their voices to make systemic change in the education ecosystem. Sometimes you’ve got to center the people closest to the challenges and the problems to understand how to generate the solutions to solve them and drive things forward.
We live in a state where 40% of our students are people of color, and our educators of color make up less than 15%. It’s extremely important, especially when you’re dealing with the least represented, to understand the value that brings and also how to cultivate it. If you’re not listening to people to understand explicitly what that looks like and how it feels (to be in their position), you’re not going to be very effective in your solutions. A lot of times people lean on quantitative data, which is good, but qualitatively you’ve got to lean in and understand what’s going on with people. It’s one thing to say “hey I’m racially isolated in my building.” It’s another thing to understand how that shows up and what that feels like so you can be strategic in how you solve things.
For us, there’s not a district or partner that we go into an agreement with without the understanding that we’re going to be listening and learning from our educators of color in those spaces. So when we say “Hey, these are the things we’re going to use to drive forward innovative solutions and support,” it’s not coming from us as an external organization, it’s coming from people who work and serve in the district. And oftentimes, many districts just don’t have the systems in place to tap into that voice in a very honorable manner.
Dr George: Right now we have two district partnerships (with Knox and Hamilton counties), but we only piloted Possip in one this year. These are our larger metropolitan districts and one of the things we realized very quickly was there was no system for feedback–rapid feedback–particularly between educators of color and districts. The other thing we realized is the reason why we even started these partnerships: we’re trying to address retention within districts. Tennessee’s known to have all these “grow your own strategies,” investing a lot of money to recruit, but we have not done our due diligence.
When it comes to keeping people, in most of these larger districts, we lose more people than we recruit year-over-year. We’ve dug into the data and realized attrition was the biggest problem. When folks are recruiting 30, 40, or 50 educators, they’re turning around and losing 60, 70, and 80. They’re losing more in some districts than what they’re recruiting. Most of this exodus doesn’t necessarily take place during the winter break, we were seeing it happening during the summer. You may see five to ten people [leave] in the middle of the semester, and 30, 40, and 50 at the end of the year.
as a way to be able to gauge how people were feeling throughout the year, so we can make adjustments to their needs in real-time. The value of what we’ve seen is in asking the first main question “Are you happy in your work environment?” The Pulse Check showed we had about 20% of people say no, 40% said yes, and then another 40% said mostly. In the most recent Pulse Check, half of those “mostly” respondents have moved over to yes, so now we have 68% saying yes, 15% saying no, and then there’s now 17% in the mostly group.
One of the biggest things we heard was, “I’m one of two (people of color) in my building, but I don’t know the people in the building next to me.” So, we’ve instituted optional affinity groups. This gives people an opportunity to connect. Possip enabled us to act in real-time.
So to recap, we initially created a space [for feedback]. Then instituted support that people were saying they needed. Thus allowing them to get better and feel better. I think that’s been a driving force in making a shift– from people on the fence about their work environment, which we know plays a huge role on whether people will stay, and them saying, “I feel better about this now.” It’s also a shift from lip service.
Sending a Pulse Check routinely added an extra layer of communication, which again, most people don’t have set up in their districts. And if they do have it, there’s oftentimes a mistrust that exists that doesn’t allow people to truly engage. I think the fact that we’re running the Pulse Check, and it’s not coming from the district, people have a level of comfort. They’ve been able, to be honest, and vulnerable in ways that I don’t think they had been, or have had the opportunity to, in the districts that they’re serving in.
and communicate it to their district or school leaders?Dr. George: I have an ongoing check-in with the Human Resources’ talent team, so when the Pulse Check Reports become available, I share them with them. Sometimes there are things that we can react to and do within reach of our organization, but sometimes there are things that the district needs to know to react accordingly. Sometimes comments are just people saying, “Hey, our AC isn’t always working in our building” or “We’ve had some infestation in our building.” Things like that are things the district needs to know.
Because we have a system in place where there’s constant communication– affinity group meetings, meetings with their talent team, Pulse Check Reports, etc– that allows us to be preemptive in some regards.
The district was so impressed with the circular motion of the communication, of that loop being created and closed. We’ve used the tool so intentionally that the loop that’s been created with the district office enables them to see the value. Now they want to potentially scale it across the district with all educators. That’s invaluable.
I’m hoping that moving forward, as we continue to generate and develop district partnerships, Possip can be a staple within that. For example, we recently announced a partnership with Knox County. We just did some engaging with stakeholders and one of the recommendations made is that we need continual Pulse Checks. Just because there’s an opportunity to address attrition differently. Now that I have data to say “look at what we’re doing here in this district” as an example, it was an easy “yes, let’s build that into what we want to do.” My hope as we go into the next academic year is that we’ll also have Pulse Checks instituted in that district as well. We’re also looking longer down the road. TECA now has 3000 people in the network. Of the 3,000, 70% are educators of color across the state– Middle, East, and West TN.
In my conversation with rural districts, it’s even harder for them to establish a general partnership. They’re facing infrastructure challenges in buildings that they want to address. But, being able to get a pulse from those few, limited educators of color in a rural district can still add value to the overall view of what we’re trying to do here in the state. Hearing their voices aligns well with our (TN’s) more recent educator diversity policy that was adopted last year. Districts have to have goals, they have to have recruitment and retention strategies. Hearing staff voices can increase the diversity of perspectives from educators in roles across the entire state. So, short-term, we’re continuing to build partnerships, but long-term we’re wanting to have a broader reach to understand what’s going on, especially in places where district partnerships may not be in existence currently.
Thanks to Dr. Diarese George from TECA for participating in our Q&A! Want to learn more about how you can hear from staff voices? Reach out to us using our contact form or join our next demo!
Interview by Jasmine Blue. Editors: Natalie Sessoms, Cora Stammen, and Jasmine Blue.
The post How TECA Uses Possip to Further Equity appeared first on Possip | Engagement Platform | School Feedback App.
Virginia Williams is a Possip reporter with a background in Elementary Education & Special Education from Raleigh, NC.
We all know that drop off and pick up at schools can be a headache. Families express frustrations about inefficiency, and concerns about safety. Teachers often dread the assignment of carline duty. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
With planning and thoughtfulness, the carline can be a place of joyful interactions between students, parents and staff.
It is the first and last moment of each child’s school day and arguably the most frequent face-to-face encounter that families have with school employees. So, it is worth spending some extra time thinking about your school’s carline logistics for both arrival and dismissal. Here are some tips for increasing efficiency, improving safety and creating a better experience for everyone involved in school drop off and pick up.
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And if you enjoy nerding out on this topic, here’s an article you might find interesting!
We know the first few weeks of school can feel overwhelming and we are rooting for you! We hope these tips support you in making a strong plan for your carline!
The post Carline and Transportation Solutions: Trend #4 appeared first on Possip | Engagement Platform | School Feedback App.
