What Teacher Appreciation Really Looks Like

Gifts are great, but what teachers truly need isn’t in a tote bag

Hey, how’s it going? I’m Erik Johnson—a veteran social studies teacher, university professor, and educator coach. In this newsletter, I share practical teaching tips, deep dives into education topics, and the occasional piece on my personal interests. If it’s your first time here, take a look at my coaching homepage, and don’t forget to subscribe!

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A Free Deep Dive

I was recently struck by the intensity of the discourse surrounding Teacher Appreciation Week, especially on Threads. I like to browse teacher social media to connect with other educators, and Threads tends to feel more authentic than BlueSky. Sure, Threads has its share of engagement bait, weird bot accounts, and AI-generated slop, but it also has a lot of meaningful posts from real teachers.

In the weeks leading up to Teacher Appreciation Week this year, my feed was flooded with breathless posts. Parents were stressing about what to buy their child’s teacher. Teachers were debating what they did and didn’t want to receive. Overall, folks seemed too invested in what teachers should get. People were getting mad!

Maybe it seems strange to me because I’m a high school teacher. I’ve spent ten years teaching in a large urban school, so the expectations around appreciation look different for me than they might for elementary or middle school teachers, where parent involvement tends to be higher and gift-giving more common. But even so, I started to feel like a little unpacking around Teacher Appreciation Week had become necessary.

I want to state up front: teachers deserve to be appreciated. Society should value teachers more. After all, we’re on the front lines of guiding youth to become the adults of tomorrow. We do important work.

And teaching is difficult. If you’re a teacher reading this, take a moment to list everything you’re expected to do in a single day, especially in contrast to the time you’re given to do it. Put it in the comments! We teachers know there’s never enough time in the school day to do everything that needs doing.

There’s also the vast emotional labor: supporting students through trauma, anxiety, and grief. We are on high alert at all times, watching out for the well-being of our students. Worrying about them long after the school day ends. We shoulder those burdens because we want our students to be well, because being well is the foundation of being able to learn. Maslow before Bloom, always.

But there’s just too much of all of it. Ask any veteran teacher, and they’ll tell you that one of the first things new teachers have to learn is what they’re going to let slide. Personally, I really struggled with this at the start of my career. I do not have the time or bandwidth to complete my work at the standard that I am capable of. That’s not to say I’m a bad teacher, but I know I could certainly be better.

I know teachers who’ve previously held jobs that put them in regular physical danger and they still say teaching is harder. So yes, teachers deserve appreciation!

But the recent wave of posts from parents obsessing over what to buy, and from teachers preoccupied with what they’ll get, didn’t sit right with me. Not because I don’t think teachers should be appreciated, but because it feels like a symptom of something deeper. I think many teachers aren’t feeling valued the other 51 weeks of the year. I see this as an issue of school culture.

Appreciation should start at the top. First and foremost, school administrators have a professional responsibility to ensure that their staff feel safe, supported, and genuinely valued. That means more than occasional token gifts like umbrellas, tote bags, or branded lunchboxes. That means establishing an ongoing schoolwide culture of appreciation, because the kind of appreciation that matters is personal.

It’s an administrator stopping me in the hallway to tell me they heard the PD I ran went great.

It’s an administrator emailing me to say students and teachers mentioned my classroom in a panel discussion as an example of what excellent teaching looks like.

It’s a student sliding a Grateful Dead sticker across my desk because they saw it at Guitar Center and thought of me.

It’s a student I’ve never even taught (I know them through a colleague’s class) stopping by my office to chat for thirty minutes, then shaking my hand on the way out.

It’s a student pretending to be paparazzi waiting outside my classroom every Friday.

It’s a student telling me during a one-on-one conference that I’ve been an important male figure in their life, and that they look up to me.

That’s what makes me feel appreciated. But for these things to occur, that culture of appreciation needs to be established at a school. So, I want to offer one practical way to shift your school culture.

Every couple of months (especially when I notice my colleagues looking burned out) I dedicate a class period to teacher appreciation. I put on some music, a livestream of a bird feeder, and ask my students to write a note to a teacher who’s made an impact on them. I arrange it so I drop the letters off at the end of the day, so teachers receive them when they check their mailbox in the morning.

Over time, this practice has spread. Other teachers have started doing it too! And now, it’s not unusual for teachers to arrive at school to find a handwritten note of thanks waiting for them. For teachers who implement this, it’s also not uncommon to receive notes from their own students!

Thanksgiving appreciation I received this year

This is what teacher appreciation really looks like. It’s not about a gift card or swag, but a culture of teachers and students valuing one another.

And like so many things in education, if we want it to exist… teachers have to build it ourselves. Be a part of this culture shift at your school! Let me know how it goes 🫡