Every school leader grapples with the weight of educator burnout, and compliance-focused evaluations often worsen it. A pattern of "deficit-detection" causes leaders to focus on errors instead of successes, unintentionally fostering a culture of scrutiny over support for teachers.
We reached out to former Folio admin and E.E. Ford design team member, Lori Cohen, to share her simple, powerful personal discipline called Five Appreciation Fridays. It’s a habit built on the insight that thriving relationships—including those between leaders and teachers—require five positive interactions for every negative one. The practice uses a built-in recognition feature, like Spotlights in the myFolio platform, to ensure you proactively capture moments of excellence to combat teacher burnout and build a positive school culture.
Think about your last classroom observation. Did you notice the three students deeply engaged in collaborative problem-solving, or did your eye go straight to the one student on their phone? When you scan the room at faculty/staff meetings, does your attention drift toward those who are more difficult rather than those quietly sustaining your school's culture through small, consistent acts of care?
Left unchecked, the practice of noticing what’s wrong creates leadership cultures built on deficit-detection, which only tells part of the story of the people in our school buildings.
When I became Dean of Faculty at the Bay School of San Francisco, I inherited the oversight of Folio. The Spotlights feature had been underused in the past. I wanted to change that, and I knew that anything leaders want others to do, they need to do themselves.
So I started a practice I called Five Appreciation Fridays.
I printed a list of every staff member, including those I didn't supervise. Each week, I identified five people to attune to. I watched for specific contributions: how they responded to a struggling student, how they facilitated a meeting, how they showed up for colleagues.
Every Friday before leaving the building, no matter how exhausting the week, I sent five spotlights—specific, genuine, and brief.
I didn't announce this practice or make it public. It was something I chose to do, grounded in research I trusted. Marriage researcher John Gottman found that thriving relationships require five positive interactions for every negative one. I was applying that ratio to my leadership, and hopefully, building a reservoir of trust and goodwill that could sustain honest feedback and hard conversations when they were needed.
This practice changed how I saw the people I worked with. During classroom observations, I stopped fixating solely on unclear instructions and started also noticing moments of student engagement. In growth conversations, I could name specific strengths before addressing areas for development, even for more challenging colleagues.
I also began noticing people I'd previously overlooked: the front office staff member who ran to open the door for a student carrying too many items; the colleague who quietly ensured coffee was always available; the teacher who followed up with a student after class to check that their accommodations had been met. These seemingly small acts shaped our school culture, and I wanted to bear witness.
When I wrote Integrating Educator Well-Being, Growth, and Evaluation with my colleague Elizabeth Denevi, I drew on this work. Relationships aren't separate from evaluation and growth; they're foundational to both.
Our book presents an ecosystem framework where equity, well-being, growth, and evaluation are interwoven. You can't have genuine growth without psychological safety. You can't evaluate equitably without first seeing people in their totality. And you can't sustain educators through chaotic, fractured times if they don't feel valued.
Five Appreciation Fridays became part of that infrastructure for me.
Educator burnout remains staggeringly high. The pull toward cynicism and deficit-detection is strong—and honestly, sometimes warranted right now.
But I've also learned that once you train yourself to notice quiet acts of goodness, you can't unnotice them. They're everywhere, if you're paying attention.
The young people in our schools take their cues from us. Who do we want to be for them? What might shift in your school's culture if you spent five minutes every Friday catching people doing something right? It might reshape your leadership more than you expect.
