{"id":1051,"date":"2018-07-01T23:25:52","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T03:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2018-07-01T23:25:52","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T03:25:52","slug":"week-one-at-higher-achievement-organizational-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/2018\/07\/01\/week-one-at-higher-achievement-organizational-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Week One at Higher Achievement- Organizational Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This past week was my first week teaching at Higher Achievement, and one of the first things I noticed about my team was the culture. Because of the nature of the organization as a non-profit dealing with children and their educational success, everyone has the same mindset and attitudes towards their work; we all are there because we love what we do and we want our students to succeed. This first week was absolutely exhausting, and I cannot imagine anything harder than what I had to deal with last week. I am teaching 7th and 8th graders, who are an extremely difficult bunch, so I was basically having one big, week-long mental breakdown, constantly on the verge of tears. It was both mentally and physically draining, and it was the first time in my life that I was unable to see the potential in kids. However, what had got me through the week was the team that I was surrounded with. Because we all have the same attitudes towards kids and education, we were constantly reminding each other of why we were doing what we were doing and we were constantly leaning on each other for support. Our site supervisor especially was always reminding us that it was only the first week and it will get better. We have a very informal culture and way of interacting and communicating with one another, and that informality is what makes our culture so strong and allows us to all connect and be “best” friends with each other, even though we had all just met a few days prior.\u00a0Additionally, a huge part of the culture of Higher Achievement revolves around having high energy, being upbeat and positive. We are constantly breaking out in chant in community meetings or in the classroom with our students, and that level of energy from everyone really contributes to the overall culture and feel of the organization and my site in particular. One of the most interesting parts of our company culture to me is the vast difference in ages among all members of the team. Out of all eight teachers, I am by far the youngest; everyone else is out of college, some are even in their 30s. Similarly, there is a vast difference in experience- some teachers have never taught kids in any capacity, and some teach for a living. However, the interesting part about our team is that none of this was apparent, at least not to me. Although I am way younger than everyone, I never felt younger or more inexperienced, and that all goes back to our informal, laid back, and supportive dynamic. There is no feel of a power dynamic or a strict formal way of interacting with each other, and because of that, we have all been able to connect so strongly and rely on each other for support, even though we had just started working together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past week was my first week teaching at Higher Achievement, and one of the first things I noticed about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2393,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[76607],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-organizational-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}