Episode #96: Creating an Award-Winning Culture Leading with Kindness and Empathy with Jennifer Appel

Jennifer Appel has been teaching for 21 years and is a teacher and coach at Enterprise Middle School in West Richland, Washington. She helped launch a blog about School Culture and helped roll out a student-led leadership podcast called the Award-Winning Culture. Jennifer as part of the coveted Teach Better Speakers Network presents at conferences, schools, and districts all over the country.<br />Your background <br />I've basically taught a little bit of everything. In college, my major was elementary ed with a reading minor and said I would never teach over 3rd grade. When I graduated from college, Hans was still getting his masters so I needed a job. My next-door neighbor was the middle school principal who told me she had a 7th-grade math job. I took it and been in middle school ever since. I was a track coach, a basketball coach, and a volleyball coach. I taught college classes for ten years at a local university and at the middle school taught every subject except science. Hans was hired at the same middle school a year later, so we've been here at Enterprise Middle School together for 20 years.<br /><br />Hans and Jennifer Appel [Hans's podcast: Episode #54]<br />Where you live and work<br />Where Hans and I live is called the Tri-Cities: Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland. We live in Kennewick and work in West Richland which is a small town west of Richland. It is in the southeast corner of Washington and on the other side of the mountains from Seattle which is actually a desert. In the winter, we get snow and in the summer, it's like 100 degrees. In the last 10 years, we've become more like Napa Valley. We have a bunch of vineyards and wineries all around us. My parents live close to us in the same house since I was four months old. Their house was the only house on the hill and dirt roads when I was a kid. Now everything is developed around us. There were maybe 100,000 people in the Tri-Cities and now there are over 300,000 people. Enterprise Middle School was built in 2005 and they just built another midd