Creating a Tradition of Peer Recognition Among Teachers

At a faculty meeting in my second year of teaching, our school’s new principal held up a battered old cowboy boot stuffed with a bouquet of plastic Texas wildflowers. This, she declared, was the Stinky Boot, a tradition she was carrying on from her previous campus. How it worked, she explained, was that each week one teacher would be its recipient and then pass it along to a deserving successor of their choosing.

Almost two decades later, I still remember the week that I saw my name in the faculty-wide email. I was still a very new teacher, trying my best but getting a lot of things wrong, and a colleague with whom I ate lunch in the teachers’ lounge every afternoon kindly chose me to pass the Stinky Boot along to after he had received it himself. Being noticed for my efforts gave me such a boost of encouragement, but the moment that stands out to me even more was a week later, when it was my turn to select a teacher for the award.

I wrote a long email to everyone on our school’s distribution list about how inspired I was by one of my mentor teachers and how she embodied the values that I aspired to. Articulating the ways in which I saw her contributing to our community helped me feel like I had a role in determining what kind of place I was working in. I felt even more powerful giving the award than I did receiving it.

I moved on from that school to another one in a different city before moving again, and the Stinky Boot faded from my memory. I found my forever school, where I intended to teach for the rest of my career, and those happy years flew by. But then every stroke of bad luck possible seemed to hit our campus at once: the pandemic, the loss of some beloved administrators, staggering budget cuts leading to a “reduction in force” and skyrocketing class sizes, and a strict districtwide turnaround model with an unrelenting emphasis on standardized testing. In a single year, almost half of our teachers resigned.

I felt powerless against forces so much bigger than a single teacher. Every day seemed like a slog, and the campus that I loved no longer seemed recognizable. There was so much outside of my control, but I could make the choice to affirm all of the good work I saw my colleagues doing in spite of the challenges they faced, and I could remind them that they had the power to do the same.

Starting a tradition

I ordered a carved wooden statue of Charlie the cardinal, our school mascot, from Etsy. With my administration’s permission, I sent a schoolwide email proposing a new tradition in which we would pass the praise each week. I modeled how I was proposing we structure the system: I chose a colleague whose efforts I thought deserved some special recognition, went to their class during the day and gave them the trophy, took a picture, and attached that in an email to the whole faculty and staff, along with a paragraph explaining why I appreciated the colleague’s contributions to our community so much.

A week later, they did the same thing, and the daisy chain of positive recognition has now continued for two years. People now know what it means when they see someone carrying the giant cardinal into another teacher’s classroom. When they notice it sitting on someone’s desk, they enjoy sharing in the congratulations. The emails function as a reply-all chain that we all look forward to.

Here’s a recent message from my colleague Jenny Elam in recognition of fellow teacher Kristin Railsback:

“Ms. Railsback is the most accomplished new teacher I have ever worked with. She came in ready to learn and contribute right off the bat and spent the year becoming an expert in our curriculum. Even as a new teacher, she worked to develop engaging lessons that helped our students master the skills they will need in their AP classes. Her classroom management was authoritative, yet fun and kind. Her students love her so much they created a flag with her face on it! I know that Charlie’s time with her will be fun and educational!”

In a single school year, our traveling trophy visits more than 30 teachers, counselors, administrators, and clerks. In a school as large as ours, with more than 200 faculty and staff, it has helped us get to know more of our many colleagues, whose work is essential to running such a complicated system smoothly.

Giving recognition

You can start a traveling trophy tradition at any point during the school year, but the beginning of the year is a great time to kick it off. It doesn’t need to be a literal trophy—any kind of statue or physical object will work. And best of all, it takes very little work to maintain, since people are so eager to do their part to pass the trophy along once it reaches them. And if someone gets busy and takes a few extra days to compose their email and award it to the next recipient, it’s not a big deal, and the cycle continues.

Our traveling trophy hasn’t fixed any of the challenges facing schools today. We still have too many responsibilities and too few resources. Standardized testing still happens every spring, and the copy machine still breaks. But it helps to remind us that meaningful work is about more than test scores and that every member of our community is someone who is both deserving of and capable of giving recognition to others, of having a say in the values that we hold as a school.