Educator Well-Being: Practical Steps to Lead a Healthy Career

Educator well-being in today’s teacher workplace is a hot topic of conversation. As part of a recent report in July 2019, ‘teaching staff and education professionals report the highest rates of work-related stress, depression and anxiety in Britain.’ (www.gov.uk) It is with little surprise, therefore, that leadership teams have made educator well-being a staple ingredient of whole-school agendas. The report, which focused on the five elements of health (physical and mental), relationships at work, purpose (such as workload), environment and security, in general concluded that educator well-being is a complex system which goes far beyond the realms of liking one’s job.

Aside from the inspirational nature of teaching students and making a difference, for which is at the core of every teacher’s motivation to enter the profession, the report commented on the negative aspects of ‘high workloads’ and ‘lack of work-life balance.’ As a result of these findings, I wish to share some strategies to which could help combat increased workload and work-life balance. Leadership teams do well to embrace this topic but there are simple choices we can take as educators to maximise our well-being in schools.

1. Sleep Longer

There is a fantastic book which I think every educator should read called ‘Eat Move Sleep’ by Tom Rath. In a nutshell, it comments on the need for us to eat healthy, increase regular exercise and get plenty of rest as ingredients for effective well-being. As teachers, we are expected to deliver PSHE lessons to our students, for example, on topics such as work-life balance, mental and physical health and positive eating habits yet we are guilty of not heeding our own advice! According to Rath, ‘One less hour of sleep does not equal an extra hour of achievement or enjoyment. The exact opposite occurs. When you lose an hour of sleep, it decreases your well-being, productivity, health and ability to think. Yet people continue to sacrifice sleep before all else.’ (p.17) How often have we stayed up late to complete marking or as an NQT, sacrificed sleep for lesson planning or the next day’s observation? Further to Rath’s argument is Professor K. Anders Ericsson influential studies of human performance. Professor Ericsson found that ‘The best performers work in bursts. They take frequent breaks to avoid exhaustion and ensure they can recover completely… [to allow them] to keep going the next day’ (p. 18). This is so true of our students. We cannot expect our students to perform to the highest standards on limited sleep - as educators, we are no different. To achieve work-life balance, sleep and workload should also be balanced to achieve greater productivity.

2. A Healthy Organisation

I would argue that the most successful schools are those that hold and maintain a healthy work environment. I am sure many of us have experienced a toxic staffroom that fuels itself by gossip, hearsay and back chat. Such environments lead to fragmentation, friction and competition between employees. Sometimes competition can be healthy but not if this competition is at the expense of another colleagues’ teaching or department. ‘The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business’ by Patrick Lencioni is an insightful read of how to achieve organisational health in the workplace. Lencioni argues the value of health versus intelligence in the workplace by stating that ‘an organisation that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. That’s because people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes.’ (p. 9) He argues further that the success of any team is one that is vulnerable, that eliminates competition and self-absorption and embraces the spirit of the team as a collective whole. It’s acceptable to be wrong and to say ‘I’m sorry’ in the workplace as much as it’s acceptable to showcase talent and worth. All these factors should be equal with each other to create a stress-free and productive environment where interpersonal relationships are healthy.

3. You are what you eat.

As mentioned above, the value of sleep is priceless. Yet along with sacrificing sleep, we as educators tend to cut corners with food. In trying to ‘catch up’ with sleep, one might sacrifice breakfast as Rath comments, ‘when you skip breakfast altogether, you are likely to eat more by the end of the day. Regularly missing breakfast causes your body to store additional fat and increases your waistline over time, compared with people who regularly consume a healthy breakfast.’ (p. 101) Eating breakfast is vital for providing you with the energy it needs to maintain a healthy mind and body.

4. Type Less; Speak More

Today, we seem absorbed with reading and writing emails. When I joined the teaching profession, I found it difficult to stop reading emails beyond the school premises, as with email accounts synced to mobile phones and personal laptops. Many of us leave school to then log back into our accounts! Furthermore, if we receive an email from a parent after-hours, for example, we feel the necessity to respond immediately.

Upon reflection, I try to adhere to the following system of working:

1. Send emails for a global audience only

2. After 6pm, do not open emails

3. Allow a response time of 24-48 hours – it can wait.

With regards to point number 1, we as a modern society neglect the value of face-to-face communication. An email to one individual can easily be done face-to-face in a classroom or over a cup of tea in the staffroom. The value of face-to-face communication is vitally important to help form friendly relationships with staff. Also, with connection to the previous section on organisational health, email communication has the potential to fuel friction in the staff room. Educators should avoid aggressive written communication that includes sentences in capitals or bold font and should be wary of the email’s tone.

5. The Fist Bump!

So far since 2008, I have had at least one cold/flu bout every school year. This may have been caused by poor health choices such as lack of sleep or poor dietary choices. It may also have been caused by spreading of germs in the classroom. With young people often becoming sick over the course of the school year, there is always the strong possibility of teachers becoming sick, too. When greeting students by the classroom door, I would often greet students with a high five or handshake, thus potentially arming myself with some level of infection. As a result, a new policy I have adapted is to use the ‘fist bump’ as the primary means of teacher-student interaction. The fist bump is a very popular gesture with showing students respect and furthermore, protects my palms and fingers from contamination!

Summary

In my current workplace, we are encouraged to have well-being days. These well-being days are very generous and well-received, but they are only one small step to achieving permanent educator well-being. Well-Being cannot be achieved by mere good-will gestures but it can be achieved by us as educators making wiser, informed-decisions on maintaining the balance to work and life.

Peter Deam

23rd February 2020