The Virtuous Cycle of Fostering Wellbeing in Our Schools

By Wendy Kopp & Radha Ruparell

What would you want for your child: a classroom where they feel unsafe, unsure, and unfulfilled, or one where they feel light, loved, and inspired to live fully?

Who would you rather have teaching your child: a teacher who is tired, stressed, and on edge, or a teacher who is grounded, loving, and at their best?

Across the Teach For All network, as we have considered what it will take to develop students as leaders who can shape a better future, the imperative of fostering students’ wellbeing has taken a center stage. We want students to feel healthy, secure, and loved, so they can be themselves, take risks in ways that foster deeper learning, and exert leadership from a place of strength.

But the conversation around wellbeing is not just limited to students. As we’ve come together across our network to think about how to recruit and retain teachers in this era, wellbeing is again in the spotlight. Focus groups of prospective new teachers conducted by our network partners in Armenia, Austria, India, Colombia, and Brazil revealed more loudly than ever before that this generation is prioritizing their wellbeing and seeking employers who do so as well. They shared that the pandemic taught them to place a higher value on relationships, physical and mental health, ‘slowing down’, and finding a balance between their careers and other areas of their lives. As they move forward and away from the height of the pandemic, they are seeking to maintain that sense of balance.

And it doesn’t stop there. As we investigated how to mitigate teacher attrition by analyzing data collected from across our network, we discovered something interesting. It turns out that “engagement” levels of staff members of Teach For All partner organizations (our closest proxy for staff wellbeing) correlate to trends in teacher retention. This means that what these organizations do to take care of their team members — including those who serve as teacher trainers and coaches — translates to how teachers feel.

The implication is that we’re looking at one big virtuous cycle — if we can foster the wellbeing of ourselves and our teams, in turn we can foster the wellbeing of teachers, who in turn can foster the wellbeing of students.

So how do we activate this virtuous cycle? We are learning four things about what it takes to enable wellbeing across the system:

1. Reframe the narrative

For too long, in frontline professions like teaching, self-sacrifice has been normalized, whereas self-care has been seen as indulgent. It’s time for us to flip the narrative.

We know intuitively that a teacher’s state of “being” matters but there have been some advances recently in neuroscience that now validate the impact of this cycle on students. Science shows us that a student may mirror the emotional state of a teacher. This means that a calm teacher can inspire calm in her students, whereas a stressed teacher can pass on stress to students.

Brain science also shows us that when students are in stressed states, it not only affects their wellbeing, but it also inhibits the executive centers of their brains responsible for higher order cognitive thinking, thereby affecting their ability to learn.

So if we’re concerned about student wellbeing and learning, then we need to reframe teacher wellbeing not as a nice-to-have, but as a must-have.

2. Create space for healing

Teachers and students today are facing a great deal of trauma, driven by enormous global challenges such as the pandemic, war, and refugee crises, and local challenges as well. As just one example, in Bangladesh, 90% of students face violence at home or corporal punishment at school.

The challenge is that when this trauma is not addressed, it continues to persist in the system. In contexts ranging from Lebanon to the Gambia, we are seeing examples of intergenerational trauma that persist over decades, because little was done to heal from past effects of colonialism, war, endemic poverty, and other systemic challenges.

If we wish to center wellbeing, we need to find ways to heal, and that requires building staff members’ and teachers’ capacity to address trauma. As one effort to do this, this year, Teach For All launched a global five-month Trauma and Wellbeing Practitioner Fellowship bringing together leaders from across 22 countries — from India to Ukraine to South Africa — with the focus on first developing their own capacity to explore trauma and toxic stress in their lives, and then supporting them to think about how they help teachers and students in their contexts address their trauma.

What’s powerful about this work is that, at its core, it’s really about the idea of teaching as healing, of creating environments where every student can feel safe, loved, and fully seen and heard. We know that’s critical to drive learning, but it’s equally important as an outcome in itself.

3. Build “inner” leadership capacities

When people struggle with wellbeing, often the root cause is an underlying feeling of “I’m not good enough” or “I can’t do it all” or “I must be 100% in control.” These sentiments only get magnified as our world becomes increasingly complex and uncertain. So we need to support our students, teachers, and staff to do the “inner work” on themselves to build skills and mindsets to navigate these challenging waters.

Across our network, we are now seeing many Teach For All partner organizations explicitly building teacher training curricula that focus on skills like resilience, mindfulness, and managing one’s emotions and energy. For example, Teach For Malaysia has built a teacher wellbeing playbook to support teachers in growing skills in a range of practices that foster wellbeing — from cognitive behavioral practices for naming emotions and disrupting negative thought patterns, to physical practices such as mindful breathing that enable teachers to pause during stressful moments. Teachers, in turn, are now building these socio-emotional skills in their students.

We’re also seeing how important it is to frame the dialogue about wellbeing within a broader conversation about one’s deeper purpose and meaning. Instead of interpreting wellbeing as “time off,” we see that it’s often about finding the congruence between our values and interests and our energy. Critical to success in building an education system around wellbeing will be embracing the idea that the highest form of wellbeing is immersing ourselves in the pursuit of doing things that matter.

4. Invest in holistic support networks

The research shows us that if teachers have strong support systems — even just one to two strong relationships in a school — it can make a huge difference in their sense of wellbeing. What’s even more powerful is putting a broad and holistic network of support around teachers. As one example, Ako Mātātupu (Teach First New Zealand) has created a whole community of care around teachers to support their wellbeing, grounded in indigeneous practices that are relationship-centered and prioritize holistic care. Teachers have access to a range of support, from coaches who provide pastoral care to a professional therapist who is deeply grounded in the organization’s values. Their focus is on the wellbeing of the whole person, and ensuring that all aspects of a teacher’s human experience — their culture, their family life, their identity — are fully valued.

And it’s not just support networks at the local level that matter. As we’ve been developing a Global Mental Health and Wellbeing Community for teachers and other leaders across our network, we’re hearing equally powerful reflections from them about the value of peer support across borders. At almost every gathering, a common sentiment expressed by community members is a feeling of relief that “I am not alone on this,” which is often accompanied by a renewed sense of possibility about taking on the challenges that they face.

Historically, wellbeing has been a “nice to have” in many schools and school systems. The pandemic has placed it front and center, and in the process may have given us the key to a thriving system that attracts committed professionals, supports them to be at their best, and in the process ensures that all of our young people fulfill their potential.

If we strive for a society where every human being can feel safe, loved, and well, then let’s begin this pursuit in our schools, because they are a microcosm of our larger world.

Wendy Kopp is the CEO & Co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations in more than 60 countries all working towards the mission of developing collective leadership to ensure all children fulfill their potential. Radha Ruparell is the Head of the Global Leadership Accelerator at Teach For All.