How can we support students in expressing appreciation for their teachers? It’s easy: just ask them!

UVEI recently participated in Lebfest, a fall celebration organized by the Upper Valley Business Alliance. It’s an event that is open to all, featuring a large number of organizations and business throughout the Lebanon area. At our table we invited all community members to think of a teacher who has made a positive impact on them and to write a short “thank you note” to that teacher which we would mail to their school.

Visitors to our table included students in preschool through college, former students, parents, and even teachers themselves (including several UVEI alums). At the suggestion of thanking a teacher, eyes lit up! Not everyone had time to stop, but those who did were hooked. How to choose just one teacher? What to say? How to decorate the postcard? (We witnessed some budding artists who created 20-minute masterpieces, and others who preferred an understated scribble or even no decoration at all.) From a middle school student who wrote an anonymous thank-you note “to teachers” at his school, to a parent-child “team” who wrote and illustrated three postcards for three teachers at one school, to a kindergartener who wanted to say that her teacher gives the best hugs… community members had a lot of gratitude and wanted to express it in their own way.

These postcards are just a small sample of the gratitude that the community feels for teachers.

Since the event we have taken up the task of addressing about 50 postcards. These are being sent to daycares, K-12 schools, colleges, and even a couple of retired or former teachers. We’ve had to make some minor editorial decisions on where to send and we hope that they get to their intended recipients and brighten their days a bit. Talking with people that day convinced us that these postcards are just a small sample of the gratitude that the community feels for teachers.

As a graduate school of education, UVEI engages with educators on a regular basis. At Lebfest, we had an opportunity to engage with the wider community outside the bounds of a school, and we found it both rewarding and relevant. We hope to do more of this in the future – to help inspire ourselves and other community members to express their appreciation for the work that educators do every day.