Professional Respect Is the Most Important Form of Teacher Appreciation
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that no amount of pizza parties or gift cards can replace genuine professional respect as the foundation of teacher appreciation.
Key Takeaways
- Respect outweighs gifts - Teachers value being treated as professionals more than any symbolic gesture
- Respect means trust and autonomy - Letting teachers do their jobs without micromanagement is the ultimate form of appreciation
- Gestures without respect feel hollow - Pizza parties in schools with toxic working conditions are insulting, not appreciative
Transcript
It's Teacher Appreciation Week, and I think the best form of teacher appreciation is respect.
Now, food is great, gifts are great, drinks are great, candy is great, but nothing substitutes for working in a respected profession.
And I think that's a collective commitment.
That's something we all have to work on as a society, you know, people who are not in education.
need to respect teaching and support people who are in the education profession by respecting their work.
And then of course, those of us who are within the profession in various capacities, I think have to keep an eye on the professional norms that determine how much we're respected.
And one thing that people have given me a hard time about recently, but I'm going to stand by, is the norm that we not take vacation during the school year.
I think this is really important for Ensuring that educators are respected, right?
If we're going to expect our students to show up every day to school, I think taking sick days is of course unavoidable.
People need to stay home when they're sick and certainly have family obligations along those lines.
But vacation is a little bit different.
And I think if we model for our students, for our families, that we don't really care that much about school days and it's fine to take a vacation any old time, as long as you can, you know, kind of get away with it.
Now, some policies are more flexible than others.
Sometimes people are lying about sick leave in order to take vacation, and sometimes it's allowed to take vacation during the school year.
But I just think as a general professional norm, it's good to be present on school days, right?
We have 180 school days.
We have 185 non-school days typically.
And that's plenty of time to fit in vacations and really signal as a profession that we're committed to this, that we value student learning.
And I think if we do that collectively, the way teachers are treated will improve and the working conditions for teachers will improve.
And to whatever extent we don't act like professionals, to whatever extent we treat this like just any other job, probably the harder that job is going to be, the less respect that we're going to have, the less support from families we're going to have.
And we're not going to get as good results with students.
So I really want to take this back to teacher appreciation.
I think obviously do nice things for the teachers in your life.
But one of the most important things you can do is respect them and uphold professional norms.
Let me know what you think.