Build Culture - Affirmation Stations

While attending EdCampCyfair I ventured into a session on building culture.  Truth be told, I was looking for ideas on building schoolwide culture but as edcamps go, the people who took ahold of the conversation were classroom teachers.  The discussion mostly hung around flexible seating but one teacher during the session mentioned "affirmation stations."  This was a new term to me so I spent most of the session on my laptop looking into the topic.  I stumbled upon this post here: Affirmation Station by Rebecca Malmquist.  It gives a great step-by-step process for incorporating this into classrooms.  

As a member of the campus leadership team, I thought about how I could take this back to my campus.  It all seemed to be perfect timing!  Valentine's Day was going to be the following month AND I head the Teacher/Student Acknowledgement Committee.  I ran the idea of an affirmation station to my fellow committee members and it went well for a few top reasons:

1) Low Cost

2) Easy Prep

3) Inclusive of EVERYONE!

1) Low Cost - We used regular, white, inexpensive envelopes.  You can get them from your local dollar store, use the school's supply, or I just used old envelopes I had saved from ordering postcards from Vista Print (and they were the PERFECT size for the die-cuts).  In essence, this project cost us NOTHING (but wait until you see the benefits below).

2) Easy prep - The committee divided the responsibilities up and conquered with limited time outside of their day.  My suggestions for dividing up the project:

•  People to decorate the wall (took 3 of us).  [Red butcher paper, some die-cut letters, and we hand wrote the staff names on the envelope.  If you have staff names on an Avery labels document, it saves even more time to just print those!]  
• We had 3 staff members designated to cut the hearts on the die-cut machine.  We stapled a gallon baggie to the end of the display and continued to fill up the bag when the supply was running low.  We also put a pack of pens inside the bag so people could use on-the-go when heating up their lunch or walking quickly through the lounge.
• We also used Outlook appointments to schedule a committee meet-up the day before Valentine's Day to ensure every staff member had at least 2 messages in their envelope and to take them off the wall and "deliver" the envelopes to their boxes.  To my amazement each staff member had at least 3-5 special messages and most had closer to 10, including our custodial and lunch staff!  

3) Inclusive of EVERYONE!  - Everyone on our staff list got an envelope.  At first, we were just going to label one larger envelope for the lunchroom staff and one larger envelope for the custodial staff, but we really wanted everyone to feel included.  Therefore, we hand wrote an envelope for every - single - staff member.  One of my very special Spanish-speaking friends even made sure to write messages in Spanish to all of our Spanish-only staff members.  How thoughtful is that?

As you can see, this simple idea ended up being a really great day for most everyone I talked to.  Want to hear more?  Check out some feedback I got from our staff:

Faculty Feedback:

So, if you're looking for an inexpensive way to create some positive vibes in your classroom, school, or other organization I would highly suggest an Affirmation Station!  It was a great experience for our group to both give and receive positive affirmations. I loved the warm feedback and the overall excitement of the week.