No matter which type of educational establishment you run, wellbeing training can make positive waves.
Wellbeing isn’t the kind of thing we think about with regards to our teaching staff. In fact, the focus is always on the students, on protecting them and improving their quality of life and education. We often overlook the staff that help facilitate a positive learning environment.
Too often, we hear stories of teachers who forced to quit over high stress levels and unreasonable working hours. Lesson planning eats into the free time as much as shopping for lesson essentials. Teachers go underfunded, buying suppliers for classrooms from their own salary. There isn’t enough time in the day to teach to the high standards that agencies and organisations set.
Enter wellbeing training: the best way to educate your educators on implementing self-care.
5 Ways Wellbeing Training Will Positively Impact your School
There are online courses that offer fully free wellbeing training for your teachers. Encourage them to use these sites. Hays Wellbeing Online Training has multiple resources that will help improve your teachers work – life balance, and therefore your school’s atmosphere.
1 – Stress Management
Educating teachers about how to better manage their stress levels lets them learn what their triggers are and encourages tighter control of these. Half the battle is learning what sets you off so you can prepare for those things not to happen. Teachers with less stress have students who are less stressed. It is a trickledown effect.
2 – Lower Staff Turnover
All that stress management means you have employees less likely to quit when the going gets too much. If you instil this training throughout your school, you can improve the wellbeing of teachers of every year group or subject. This will lead to lower absenteeism and less teachers off with chronic stress-related or mental health conditions.
3 – Improved Teaching
If you have teachers who are less stressed out, you have a better quality of teaching throughout your school, college, or university. When teachers aren’t stressed to the point o being forgetful, you improve the experience of the students and their ability to learn. Those with higher serotonin levels are fitter, more active, and happier at work. The students will benefit from this in their grades.
4 – Declining Absenteeism
A stressed teacher is one that is likely to call in sick. Teachers feel insufficiently supported, according to one Ofsted report. Factors such as a poor work – life balance, lack of resources or a perceived lack of resources, and lack of support from senior staff particularly in managing unruly behaviour, are the commonest reasons for absenteeism. In a career where over 3% of all teachers are on long term mental ill health leave, we need to do something about the stress levels.
5 – Better Motivation
If you teach your educational staff to manage their wellbeing in a positive, productive way, you can change their mindsets to a more constructive manner of thinking. This encourages creativity, freedom of expression, and brews new ways of performing in classroom environments.
In short, wellbeing promotes innovation in teaching. Let’s try to keep things moving forward.
