How school leaders can support student and teacher well-being
As I get ready to lead this month’s online workshop for the IB, I’m reading a lot about the support that school leaders can offer to their community. With students this falls into 4 main areas:
- Creating a positive culture and learning environment: students most appreciate kind teachers who listen, care and respect them. This can include a quality pastoral care system. Basically this is all about the relationships between the teachers and the students.
- Teaching social and emotional skills: this can include resilience, mindfulness, promoting learner agency and helping students to become more self-directed, and a focus on restorative justice. In IB schools much of this can come through the explicit teaching of the ATL skills (social, communication, self-management, research and thinking skills), which are seen as equally important as developing cognitive skills and content knowledge. Reports show that student mindsets have more influence on academic achievement than home environment or demographics. These skills help students both in and out of school.
- The development of character strengths: attitudes such as kindness, curiosity, fairness and so on.
- Mindfulness: helping students to become more aware of what they are thinking and feeling. Mindfulness can improve well-being, as well as physical and mental health.
To support teacher well-being school leaders can focus on:
- Systemic leadership: with clear and manageable goals for teachers. This can include clear job descriptions, clear policies and procedures, expectations around feedback to students and setting clear limits to ensure a work-life balance. Leaders need to be open to feedback themselves and to include teachers in important decisions.
- Creating a positive and non-judgemental culture where all teachers feel valued. This is especially important when designing a staff evaluation procedure, and includes supporting professional development and growth. A good way for schools to create this culture is through coaching and mentoring programmes.
- Peer support and collaboration. To do this leaders need to be aware of the meeting calendar which allows all teachers to work collaboratively. Peer support can also include coaching and the sharing of expertise so that all can learn from it, as well as celebration of successes.
As I spend a lot of time in schools leading evaluation visits, teacher support and student support are big items on our agenda that we tend to devote a whole meeting to when we discuss the school environment. My feeling is that over the past 5 years these areas have become increasingly challenging – in particular many schools note seeing a huge increase in the number of students who need support following Covid. As we think about how schools deal with various crises they face (conflict, illness, natural disasters and so on) leaders deal with particular challenges in supporting well-being. I will deal with these in my next post.
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