Content for this piece comes from the December myFolio Learning Lab, 'Listen & Lead: Gathering Better Feedback with the Mindful Minute.'
School leadership today demands tools that are both efficient for operations and supportive of faculty and staff well-being. The myFolio Mindful Minute feature is designed to be precisely that—a quick, actionable tool for gathering essential employee feedback while proactively monitoring overall well-being across your school.
By moving beyond traditional, lengthy surveys, the Mindful Minute is proving to be a game-changer for administrators who seek to lead with both data and empathy. Start using this simple but powerful feature today—we've included 6 ideas below to get you started!
The Mindful Minute: Your Administrative Force Multiplier
For administrators, the Mindful Minute is a powerful tool for efficiency and targeted action, significantly reducing the time and effort associated with the following challenges:
Proactive Risk Management & Retention:
- THE CHALLENGE: Addressing staff burnout and negative sentiment often happens in reaction to high turnover or a crisis, requiring immense administrative time and energy.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: The Wellness Check data (e.g., Energy Audit and Support Signal) provides a low-effort, continuous temperature check on staff well-being. This allows administrators to identify and address low morale or stress trends proactively with targeted support, preventing small issues from escalating into high-effort administrative crises or staff retention problems.
Maximized Staff Buy-in & Survey Efficiency:
- THE CHALLENGE: Traditional, lengthy, annual surveys suffer from low response rates and high administrative time spent chasing staff to complete them.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: The feature's core design—single, quick questions—dramatically reduces survey fatigue, leading to higher, more consistent participation. This saves administrative time and effort that would otherwise be spent repeatedly communicating about, troubleshooting, and chasing staff for feedback, ensuring leadership has the data they need, when they need it.
Data-Driven Meeting Efficiency:
- THE CHALLENGE: Meetings often run long or off-topic because administrators are guessing at what needs to be clarified or discussed next.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: The Quick Pulse and The Clarifier categories offer prompts like Muddiest Point or Time Value. Administrators can use this instant feedback to structure the next meeting's agenda, spending time only on necessary clarifications or high-value discussions, eliminating administrative time wasted on unfocused or redundant content.
Pinpointed Intervention for Strategic Initiatives:
- THE CHALLENGE: Spending valuable administrative time on broad, time-consuming inquiries to diagnose where a new strategic initiative is encountering friction.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: Data from prompts like The Blocker and Confidence Level allows for surgical, high-impact intervention. Leadership can quickly filter data to focus their limited time and resources only on the staff members who have signaled a specific point of friction or low confidence, maximizing intervention impact.
Automated Needs Assessment for PD:
- THE CHALLENGE: Relying on manual surveys and guesswork to determine professional development topics, often resulting in low-impact, irrelevant sessions.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: Prompts like Future Needs act as an automated, continuous PD needs assessment. Instead of relying on guesswork, administrators can simply run a report to instantly identify the top-requested topics across the school. This data-driven approach ensures every professional development session is immediately relevant and high-impact.
High-Impact Peer Recognition (Automated Morale Boost):
- THE CHALLENGE: Creating a consistent, high-visibility culture of appreciation requires a lot of manual effort from leadership to solicit stories and organize shout-outs.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: The Appreciation prompt in the Wellness Check category automates the collection of positive feedback. Administrators can quickly filter for these data points and easily broadcast them in a newsletter or staff meeting. This significantly reduces the administrative lift of manually gathering stories while ensuring a steady, authentic, and visible stream of peer-to-peer recognition that boosts school culture.
Built-in Accountability:
- THE CHALLENGE: Manually chasing staff members post-meeting or post-PD to confirm their next steps and ensure they follow through on commitments.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: Questions like Next Step and The "Monday" Rule encourage staff to name their own commitment, creating a soft accountability loop. This shifts the administrative follow-up from a demanding check to a simple, supportive conversation, saving countless hours chasing outcomes.
Simplified Documentation for Review & Accreditation:
- THE CHALLENGE: Gathering robust, structured evidence for accreditation reviews or annual reports on a school's commitment to faculty well-being and continuous improvement is a massive, often last-minute, administrative task.
- MINDFUL MINUTE BENEFIT: Because the Mindful Minute prompts are structured and categorized (Wellness Check, PD & Growth, Retrospective), the resulting data provides a ready-made, year-long evidence trail. This eliminates the frantic search for documentation, allowing administrators to demonstrate an authentic, data-backed commitment to faculty support and collaborative culture with minimal preparation time.
6 Strategic Uses for the Mindful Minute
1. The "Quick Pulse" ⚡ (General Feedback)
Best for: Routine operational meetings or weekly stand-ups.
💬 One Word Takeaway: If you had to describe today's meeting in one word, what would it be?
⏳ Time Value: On a scale of 1-5, was the meeting a valuable use of your time?
🗣️ The "Water Cooler" Test: What is the one thing from this meeting you will likely talk about with a colleague later today?
✉️ Efficiency Check: Could this meeting have been an email? (Yes / Somewhat / No)
2. The "Action Planner" 🚀 (Implementation Focus)
Best for: Meetings introducing new policies, schedules, or strategic initiatives.
🎯 Clarity of Purpose: Do you understand why we are making this change? (Yes / No / Sort of)
💪 Confidence Level: How confident do you feel in your ability to implement [New Initiative] tomorrow? (1 = Not at all, 5 = Very confident)
🚧 The Blocker: What is the one potential barrier you foresee in implementing [New Strategy]?
👥 Support Needed: What specifically do you need from leadership to make this successful? (Resources, training, time, etc.)
👣 Next Step: What is the very first thing you will do this week related to what we discussed?
3. The "Clarifier" 🔍 (Alignment Check)
Best for: Complex discussions where rumors or confusion might occur.
🌫️ Muddiest Point: What topic or announcement from today is still unclear or confusing to you?
📢 Rumor Control: What questions do you anticipate parents or students asking about this topic?
🎚️ Alignment: On a scale of 1-5, how aligned do you feel with the school's direction on [Topic]?
👂 Missing Voices: Whose perspective did we miss in today's discussion?
4. The "Wellness Check" ❤️ (Culture & Climate)
Best for: Stressful times of year (testing, before breaks) or heavy emotional topics.
🔋 Energy Audit: How is your energy tank currently? (Empty, Low, Half-Full, Full)
✨ One Good Thing: Share one positive thing that happened in your classroom/role this week.
🙋 Support Signal: Do you need a 5-minute check-in with an administrator this week? (Yes / No)
💌 Appreciation: Who is a colleague that helped you this week that deserves a shout-out?
5. The "PD & Growth" 🌱 (Learning Sessions)
Best for: Professional development days or instructional workshops.
🗓️ The "Monday" Rule: What is one specific strategy from today that you can use in your class next week?
🤔 Depth of Learning: I learned something new today that challenged my thinking. (Likert Scale)
🔮 Future Needs: What specific topic do you want to dive deeper into during our next session?
🎨 Format Feedback: Did the format of today's session (group work vs lecture vs solo time) work for your learning style?
Outcomes and Institutional Impact
The Mindful Minute is not just another data collection tool; it is a mechanism for compassionate, informed leadership. Used intentionally, the Mindful Minute can directly address costly high-effort, reactive challenges by providing a simple, continuous temperature check on staff well-being and engagement. By encouraging reflection—asking staff, 'Tell me what you think. What did you learn? How are you going to do this?'—the tool also offers soft accountability by capturing their stated next steps.
As Michelle Sherry, Director of Professional Learning and Technology Integration at School of the Holy Child Rye found, not only is the Mindful Minute "a great tool for me to follow up with everyone - it also led to other conversations and highlights," ensuring that next steps and successes are never missed.
Employing these strategies thoughtfully allows the Mindful Minute to ease the administrative burden for school leaders while ensuring your team feels heard, understood, and supported, leading to a stronger, more resilient school community.
Ready to put these strategies into action?
CONTINUE YOUR LEARNING
Maryvale Preparatory School, an independent Catholic school for girls in Maryland, embarked on a mission to evolve its faculty and staff observation system.
Learn how they implemented a comprehensive observation process—integrating both formal and informal methods—using the myFolio platform to foster a community of continuous professional growth.