Building Strong School Culture

Speaker 4:

I was thinking about culture and how you go into schools and observe, and certain schools have a great culture. You know when you see it, I’m not sure you could necessarily list the 10 things that make it good, but you see less turnover, you see less stress, you see more ability to be standing strong together to offset a lot of the testing culture that I know we have here in Texas, and I’m sure everyone else does as well. And that just sort of is a beat down and we all know it. And then really getting these voices to the table once we get the teachers in, regardless of where they come from. I mean, I was a career changer and I spent 20 years in industry and now I’ve been 20 years in education.

And what an interesting contrast that has been for me and I, like others had said, felt like I finally found my true place, my calling, being in education. But I think we have to really think about the voices of the teacher. I know there’s tons of research that’s been done on why teachers leave and we know we could sit here and talk about that all day long, but we have to, I think, lift up the voices of not only teachers, but students as well, so we can build a better culture and make this education thing more successful for more students.