Well-being in schools

Next month I'm leading an IB workshop on well-being.  It's an important issue, and as this workshop is a new one for me, I decided to write several blog posts about it.  Well-being is sometimes hard to define, but this is what I'm learning:

• well-being is about both the emotional (positive emotional states and the absence of negative emotions) and cognitive (life satisfaction).
• it's connected both with happiness and with quality of life
• it's about feeling good and also about functioning well
• it's about balancing the following:  physical well-being (lifestyle choices, what we eat, active living),  psychological well-being (how we think and feel about ourselves), social well-being (a sense of belonging, the quality of our relationships and communication), spiritual well-being (a sense of meaning and purpose in life),  cognitive well-being (the ability to expand our knowledge and skills),  and economic well-being (being able to meet our needs and to feel a sense of security).

The UN now produces a World Happiness Report and ranks countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.  According to the most recent data, Finland has been top of this ranking since 2010, and Afghanistan has been at the bottom - and is getting worse.  The OECD also publishes a Better Life Survey index which ranks countries on many scales (income, housing, health, safety, work-life balance, environmental quality and so on).  You can drag the sliders and see how the countries move relative to each other as the data is visualized.  In this index Norway rates the highest and South Africa the lowest.

Well-being has been an important element of many educational models such as Montessori and Waldorf and today about half of all international schools have well-being policies.  Well-being is also being seen now more in school mission statements, and parents as well as teachers are realizing that often too much pressure is put on children to "succeed" (get good grades) which is why in IB schools it's important to go beyond the academics in a school's mission.  And it's not just students who need more of a focus on well-being - teachers need it too!  It's important to prioritise staff well-being because it's only when teachers feel valued and cared for that they are able to flourish and give their best to their students.  And yet all too often teachers feel stressed and burnt out and this leads to high rates of sickness, turnover and low retention.  

Over the next few posts I'm going to explore what school leaders can do to foster a sense of well-being in their school community.  This will include both student and teacher well-being.

Image by John Hain on Pixabay