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In this chat, Kentucky teachers Ada and Ron Skillern led a conversation among educators about how simple acts of gratitude bring school communities together.

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Gratitude is a gift we can give to our kids

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Gratitude is a gift we can give to our kids

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- Ada Skillern

Read more in her blog post:

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By Ada Skillern

My mother was a stickler with her three children about just a few things: if you start something, you finish it; if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all; if someone goes out of their way to give you a gift or do something kind for you, then you write them a thank you note. And so we did, in our early years under her watchful eye at the kitchen table, and then on our own as adults, because we knew how good, how fundamentally right, it feels to do so.

Gratitude, for me, means reflection. I do believe that one of the great struggles of this stage of my life is setting aside time to examine it. Think about the effect on your own spirit when you receive an unexpected token of thanks-it literally has the power to reverse the trajectory of a challenging day, and it costs nothing. But gratitude is a gift that serves the giver even more than the intended recipient. It is a gift that I want to nurture in my students, just as we seek to instill in our own eight year-old: Some years, I have lost my way and failed to express adequately my gratitude. Last year was a particularly challenging one professionally, and when I came up for air, I found myself resolved to get back to my roots-one of those resolutions was to re-dedicate myself to consistent expressions of thankfulness and encouragement.

Some of the ways I incorporate gratitude in the classroom and broader educational community:

THANK YOU LETTERS: Seniors, a week before graduation-this is their final exam. We encourage them to reflect on those individuals who have helped them get to this point in some way, who might otherwise go unthanked-elementary & middle school teachers, coaches, pastors, counselors, principals... the responses to those letters have been enormously satisfying-elementary teachers who are moved to tears by a handwritten letter from a student they had in class ten years before; and who reciprocate with their own letter, or make a point to find them in the halls before commencement ceremonies, to give them congratulatory hugs and express their own appreciation for being remembered.

"It is a village!" This love affair of teaching and parenting and living is too intense, too full of missteps, good intentions gone awry... it is also overflowing with those who inspire us through wisdom, kindness, hard work, decency. Gratitude comes in the form of this "village" mantra I share with my students, from Day One of our time together. We are all going to screw up. It's okay. Let's be gentle with each other, let us help each other, let us recognize that when we are being challenged, we naturally will fall down-your parents probably took adorable pictures of you with food all over your beatific faces when you were learning to feed yourselves-our classroom is like that, as we grow. This year, my English II class was thrilled with this idea and came up with our class slogan: the GVO's (Good Vibes Only), and they call it out often.

THANK YOU notes for those who take the time to write you a tailored letter of recommendation.

THANK YOU notes, composed by a different student volunteer, each time we have a guest speaker, that include a specific and thoughtful takeaway, and thank them for their time.

LOVE NOTES. The Sevenzo February #SpreadtheLove challenge struck a particular chord for me. I LOVED reading other educators' practices for spreading the love in their own classrooms -- in fact, I found myself taking mental notes of ways I can interweave many of them, so that I am more deliberate in spreading gratitude throughout the year. Would also like to be more intentional about celebrating the incredible international diversity that is represented by our student body.

OLD-FASHIONED POSTCARDS sent to students' homes.

*****

Our daughter's second grade teacher ends each week with a "Student of the Week" activity that moved me to tears. Each child brings pictures from home, to be featured on the SotW bulletin board, but what is truly heartwarming are the individual notes that each classmate writes to complete the sentence, "______ is special because ____________". Mrs. Sine then puts together all of these notes into a "Why I Am Special" keepsake that is sent home. It is one of our daughter's prize possessions, and she loves coming home to tell us about what she and her classmates wrote for their peers.

Ron: the design of his room-murals & inspiring quotations chosen & created by students; asking his students who have immigrated from different countries to bring the flags of their native countries, so he can display them as part of his classroom.

From the moment we rise, to the moment we sleep, we have opportunities to make the world a little kinder or a little colder.

I remember listening to an interview that the actress Susan Sarandon gave, years ago, during which she said, "We need a witness to our lives." Someone who is paying attention to us, who recognizes that we matter. I tell my students that I believe with all of my heart that there really is no "neutral"-from the moment we rise, to the moment we sleep, we have opportunities to make the world a little kinder or a little colder. Something else that struck me years ago was watching Oprah's interview with Toni Morrison, who asked the question, "Does your face light up [when you see children]? because that allows your face to speak how your heart feels." Taking the time to express our appreciation to others is recognizing the humanity in all of us, and helping our students rise to that noble impulse is some of the deepest and most life-affirming, important learning of all.

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Encourage your students to practice gratitude this month with a simple activity that not only helps each student develop social-emotional skills, but also shows how just a few kind words can strengthen the school community as a whole.

​A small challenge to accept today for a big impact on all of their tomorrows.

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Ada Travelsted Skillern teaches English at Bowling Green High School and is a Kentucky Hope Street Group Fellow.

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Gratitude is a gift we can give to our kids - Sevenzo - Medium

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By Ada Skillern My mother was a stickler with her three children about just a few things: if you start something, you finish it; if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all; if someone goes out of their way to give you a gift or do something kind for you, then you write them a thank you note.

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A teacher retention strategy that costs nothing

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A teacher retention strategy that costs nothing

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- Ron Skillern

Did you know?
30% of U.S. teachers said one of the most significant barriers they face is a lack of supportive leadership. (Scholastic Primary Sources 2014)

8% of teachers leave the profession every year. (NCES 2016)
Read more:

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The good news: There's an uptick in the hiring of new teachers since the pink-slip frenzy in the wake of the Great Recession.

The bad news: The new hiring hasn't made up for the teacher shortfall. Attrition is high, and enrollment in teacher preparation programs has fallen some 35 percent over the past five years - a decrease of nearly 240,000 teachers in all.

Parts of most every state in America face troubling teacher shortages: the most frequent shortage areas are math, science, bilingual education and special education.

We've covered many sides of the shortage issue, including the disconnect between training and districts' needs; how the accountability obsession and paperwork are driving some good veteran teachers away; what factors help teachers stick around; as well as efforts to improve training for special-ed teachers to stem that field's attrition and chronic shortage.

Two comprehensive new reports on the issue, from the nonprofit and nonpartisan Learning Policy Institute, offer an opportunity to revisit and dig deeper into a widening problem. You can read the full reports - A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S and Minority Teacher Recruitment, Employment, and Retention: 1987 to 2013 - here. Also, check out the institute's interactive map.

I spoke with the institute's president, Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education emeritus at Stanford University and co-author of one of the reports.
Whether this is a full-blown "crisis" or just one of many problems in education depends, I guess, on where you sit. The report you co-authored is titled A Coming Crisis in Teaching? High-poverty schools have some of the biggest teacher attrition and shortage challenges. Your report notes that about half of all schools and 90 percent of high-poverty schools are struggling to find enough qualified special education teachers. These shortages are having the biggest impact on the most vulnerable students, aren't they? Do you think the question mark is really needed? Let's talk solutions. You write that teacher attrition and turnover are key factors that have to be addressed if states are going to get out of this crisis. Districts need to focus on retention as much as recruitment. Explain that.
If you're sitting in Utah or Arizona, there's no question mark - you have a crisis in teaching. If you're in better-paying Massachusetts, where there's something of a surplus in some fields, you feel a little less concerned about it. The other aspect of the question mark is about the future. We do certainly have a shortfall of teachers right now, and it looks like it will get much worse. But if we change our policies, we could solve the shortage. The question mark is really a question to us about the policies we'll put in place to address these emerging problems.
I found it troubling that most of the attrition is pre-retirement quitting, a kind of, "I'm out of here." It's not the normal retirement trends of teachers ageing out.
They are. In some places, we see from the data that 1 in 5 teachers in high-minority schools and high-poverty schools is unprepared for teaching. When you think about how dependent on school children are in these communities and what it means for the quality of education they'll receive, it's particularly alarming.

We have a very high attrition rate in the United States: 8 percent of teachers leave every year. That's a couple-hundred-thousand teachers. Less than a third of them are leaving for retirement. If you look at high-performing countries like Finland or Singapore, or go across the border to Ontario, Canada, the attrition rate is usually 3 percent or 4 percent of teachers. If we could reduce our attrition in half to 4 percent - we call it the 4 percent solution - we would actually have no teacher shortages right now. We would have plenty of supply and be able to be much more selective about who we bring into teaching. So it is a big part of the problem and the solution.
To implement the 4 percent solution, focus on pay and working conditions equally? Or one more than the other?
That's exactly right. We actually have a teaching situation right now that is probably as bad as it's been for many, many decades. Teacher salaries have been declining since the 1990s. Teachers are earning about 20 percent less than other college graduates who are similarly educated. Even after you adjust for the difference in the calendar work here, in 30 states a teacher who has a family of four is eligible for several sources of government assistance, including free or reduced-price lunch for their own children in school.

Teacher working conditions are worse than they've been. Most states that cut their budgets because of the recession have not even returned to pre-recession levels of spending, which means books and supplies and materials and computers are in short supply. Class sizes are larger than they used to be. Then we have more and more children in poverty, more and more children who are homeless, so in highly impacted communities, the needs that teachers have to be responsive to on behalf of the children are also very, very taxing.
Speaking of teacher preparation programs, President Obama's long- promised overhaul of teacher-prep programs never got off the ground. This report seems to underscore the absolute importance of revisiting that stalled reform effort, no?
Well, you know, the people who go into teaching tend not to go in it for the money per se. They generally want to do good work on behalf of children, but you do have to get salaries in the lowest-spending states up to something that's at least reasonable to support a middle-class existence. There are high-spending states, mostly in New England and a few other places where salaries are reasonable, but other states do have to worry about it. Working conditions, however, are even more important for keeping people in once they've made the choice to teach. They both matter, but I would say that working conditions are equally important.
The reports make clear that minority teachers have some of the highest attrition rates. What can be done to keep minority teachers in the classroom longer? They write that one of their biggest problems is lack of autonomy in the classroom, lack of input in decision-making. That seems to get down to management, right?
Preparation and mentoring matter a lot. Teachers who are well-prepared leave at more than two times lower rates than teachers who are not fully prepared. One of the things we often do in shortages is bring in people who haven't prepared to teach. Then we exacerbate the problem because they leave at two to three times the rate. The same thing is true with mentoring. If we could prepare teachers well, mentor them when they come in and give them decent working conditions, we would be very close to the 4 percent solution.

Absolutely. We need to make some investments in teacher preparation. Obama made a promise when he ran in 2008. He said, "If you will teach, we will pay for your education." That didn't happen, but if we were to reboot that promise and actually ensure that people who choose this noble profession do not come into it with college debt, that would also make a huge difference in the conditions of teaching and supply.
What are some concrete ways in which school districts can work on working conditions to make teachers stick around longer?
Yes. A lot of these problems do get down to management. If you look at the reasons that minority teachers leave, the first reason is lack of administrative support. The second one is concerns about the way accountability pressures in the No Child Left Behind era created pressure to teach to the test, lots of sanctions and the loss of autonomy in the classroom because quite often in central-city schools, where minority teachers are concentrated, they were moved to a scripted, teacher-proof curriculum, geared to test preparation, which is not what people go into teaching for.

They go into teaching to engage students, to excite them about learning, to create exciting classrooms. I think there's both the support that teachers need to be enabled to teach, which administrators are a key part of providing, along with the investments in their teaching conditions. Then there's the opportunity to teach freely and creatively in ways that are exciting and work for children.
Talk a little bit more about that. Should more be done to strengthen principal training or support, and what might that look like?
Of course teachers need materials that are necessary to teach. You know, the books and computers and that kind of thing. So clearly that's a first level of need. But beyond that, teachers always talk about how they want to be able to collaborate with their colleagues. They want to be in a collegial environment. They want to be clear that they're supported in their efforts. That there's moral support and the opportunity to continue to learn and be more effective, which is how teachers get their satisfaction - by meeting the needs of students in ways that allow them to see that learning.

That really means we need great principals. We need principals who know how to create learning environments for teachers as well as kids that are collegial and focused on everyone pulling together in a common direction. We do very little in this country to prepare principals.
Could be called Ed Point.
We do need to do more to support principal training and recruitment. We want to recruit into these jobs the very best teachers who are dynamic leaders as well and then help them learn the management skills that they need to succeed. There are some places that have done good work in this regard. North Carolina has a Principal Fellows Program that allows the recruitment of dynamic people and then underwrites their training. They get to train under the wing of an expert principal in an internship while they're also taking course work. That's produced a lot of great leadership in that state.
Yeah. Steal it, please. It's interesting, as a reporter, the most interesting, innovative and, I think, most successful classrooms I've visited are places where teachers feel they have a good measure of autonomy, are supported, and the schools invest in professional development. Your thoughts?

We need a real coherent approach, both in the states and with federal support, to be sure that our schools are well-led. I'd love to see us get a sort of a West Point for leadership in education the way we have the training for leaders in the military, who get the best access to state-of-the-art opportunities to learn these very difficult skills. That would make a huge difference in the quality of our schools, particularly in the highest-need communities.

I like that. I might borrow this from you, if you don't mind.

That is the special sauce right there. Teachers want to work together and collaborate, but then they have to adapt whatever they figure out to their needs of their own classroom. They want to be creative, and they need that opportunity to continue to learn and be supported by the leadership in the school. That's what makes people who want to produce learning happy. They are learners themselves. That's why people go into the profession. If you can get that secret sauce, you've got a lot of the juice you need for that 4 percent solution.

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Frustration. Burnout. Attrition. It's Time To Address The National Teacher Shortage

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The good news: There's an uptick in the hiring of new teachers since the pink-slip frenzy in the wake of the Great Recession. The bad news: The new hiring hasn't made up for the teacher shortfall. Attrition is high, and enrollment in teacher preparation programs has fallen some 35 percent over the past five years - a decrease of nearly 240,000 teachers in all.

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The mini challenge helps bring these practices to the classroom in a constructive way.

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The mini challenge helps bring these practices to the classroom in a constructive way.

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Ada Skillern shared her experience with our February mini challenge, Spread The Love. Her high schoolers lit up like little kids! Read her story:

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Expressing gratitude helps show students that, in your eyes, they have worth.

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Expressing gratitude helps show students that, in your eyes, they have worth.

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- Ron Skillern

This matters even more for students of color. Read more about stereotype threat and how you can show that your only bias is for them to succeed:

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To write a thoughtful thank you note, you have to recognize students' individual qualities. 

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To write a thoughtful thank you note, you have to recognize students' individual qualities. 

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- Ada Skillern

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A great resource for talking to kids about gratitude from kindergarten teacher Kentucky Johanna Parr

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Tom Rath is an author and researcher who has spent the past two decades studying how work can improve human health and well-being.

He has two books slated for publication in 2020, LIFE'S GREAT QUESTION: Discover How You Best Contribute to the World and IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU: A Brief Guide to a Meaningful Life, published in partnership with Amazon Original Stories.

In total, Tom's 10 books have sold more than 10 million copies and made hundreds of appearances on global bestseller lists. His first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and led to a series of books that are used in classrooms around the world. His book StrengthsFinder 2.0 is Amazon's top selling non-fiction book of all time. Tom's other bestsellers include Strengths Based Leadership, Wellbeing, Eat Move Sleep, and Are You Fully Charged?. He has also co-authored two illustrated books for children, How Full Is Your Bucket? for Kids and The Rechargeables.

During his 13 years at Gallup, Tom led the organization's strengths, employee engagement, wellbeing, and leadership consulting worldwide. Tom has served for the past five years as an external advisor and Gallup Senior Scientist. He also served as Vice-Chair of the VHL cancer research organization and has been a regular lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently, Tom co-founded a publishing company; he is also an advisor, investor, and partner in several startups. Tom holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife, Ashley, and their two children.

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How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids [Tom Rath, Mary Reckmeyer, Maurie J. Manning] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids

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What if you told every parent how happy you are to have their student in your class?

Ada shared her idea for writing thank you notes home:

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We have "Purple Spirit" cards, and I try to send, by the end of the year, one of these postcards home for every high school student I teach, with a personal note about an academic success, an act of kindness, a positive example, or a leadership trait that I saw or that I appreciate in their son or daughter.

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Ask not what our community can do for our school, but what our school can do for our community

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Ask not what our community can do for our school, but what our school can do for our community

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Johanna Parr shared her philosophy for her Kindergarten classroom, where they volunteered with a nursing home and found literacy buddies for their young readers!

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We’re so invested in this work and there’s nothing more rewarding than someone saying, that really helped me.

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We’re so invested in this work and there’s nothing more rewarding than someone saying, that really helped me.

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- Ada Skillern

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Ask second semester seniors to reflect on the people who have helped them get to this point. Have them write and present their thank-yous -- or get creative!

- Ada Skillern

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They're your students when you have them, and they're your students their whole lives.

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They're your students when you have them, and they're your students their whole lives.

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- Johanna Parr

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Some of the kids who seem like your greatest challenge will be the most appreciative later on. They're the ones who need you the most. 

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Some of the kids who seem like your greatest challenge will be the most appreciative later on. They're the ones who need you the most. 

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- Ron Skillerm

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We have those children for 7 hours of the day, and what an incredible opportunity to make a positive difference in their lives and make them feel loved. 

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We have those children for 7 hours of the day, and what an incredible opportunity to make a positive difference in their lives and make them feel loved. 

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- Johanna Parr

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It is time for my sophomores and seniors to reflect on how they can show gratitude to people in their lives. They think about much more than they express. They need to be empowered to take action.

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It is time for my sophomores and seniors to reflect on how they can show gratitude to people in their lives. They think about much more than they express. They need to be empowered to take action.

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Natalie Croney, Kentucky teacher

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Stay tuned! Live Chat Connection Going IRL

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Stay tuned! Live Chat Connection Going IRL

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We can't wait to hear about the Skillerns school visit to Klondike Elementary in Louisville, KY with Rebecca Reynolds and Johanna Parr! Follow us to stay tuned: