Growth in health, happiness and positive engagement can come about through all of the environmental factors in schools that principals, heads of departments and teachers have control over. Their responsibility is to ensure that these factors, the school’s context and systems, are optimised for the community’s wellbeing. Dr. Helen Street’s TEDx Talk gives a good introduction and back-story to the core message of her book, Contextual Wellbeing; that we need to align the systems in schools to grow wellbeing. All too often, our school systems are not aligned with what makes students and staff well or what prepares them to be well in the future, for example, the ways in which competition is incorporated into the school experience or the way in which a desire for student compliance and discipline removes the opportunity for self determination and expression.
Building communities: A place where we belong
What people need in their schools and communities is to feel as though they belong, and it is through knowing each other, understanding one another’s needs and feeling safe in being ourselves that we increase our sense of belonging. As the WHO said in their Minsk Declaration: The Life-course Approach in the Context of Health 2020, “No life is lived alone, and all human lives are connected to others in the household, community or nation”. Rather than just teaching children a curriculum full of academic content to be tested in a final summative examination, or assimilating them into a house that they will unquestioningly serve, we need to be teaching them the skills to belong; to listen, to share, to give compassion and forgiveness, to make connections, to eschew prejudice of every kind, to invite others in and to create equality… this is how we increase wellbeing.
“We cannot nurture a school social system based on competition, control and outcomes”, says Street, “and then expect to be able to teach students effectively about collaboration, autonomy and process.” If this really is the case, why do so many schools and educational institutions adhere to systems that are clearly ill suited to support learning and wellbeing in the 21st century? Is it because, as we see in other areas of life, we would rather stick to our beliefs than accept the research and the science? Is it because the work of adaptation is not in the interests of those who have power within the system? Could it be that school systems, often bound up in tradition, are too slow moving to respond to the need of the hour? If not now, then when?
It’s certainly the case that the more competitive, carrot-and-stick the schools we have visited and worked for, the lower the capacity of both students and staff to work together for a shared benefit, exercise their own imagination or initiative, and behave with integrity or adhere to standards of academic honesty. Even their preparedness to reflect on the system itself is diminished because of the role(s) they play at every level in maintaining it, whether staff or student, (What the hell is water?, see last week’s article). On the other hand, those in schools with cultures of critical reflection that lack systems of hierarchy, reward, and punishment are far more able to be supportive to one another, integrate newcomers (key for retention) and exhibit follow-through in activities that require the exercise of individual responsibility.
We have seen remarkable students and staff arrive in schools, having thrived previously, who are unable to find their place in a new context, or who are not given the opportunity or allowed to succeed because of a prevailing system of hierarchy. And vice-versa, we have seen countless examples of students who believed they were mediocre when compared to their competitive and rigid context, who were surprised by their own potential and capacity when they moved on to an open, collaborative and supporting context.
It might be a competitive world out there, but not in the way that most students are led to believe by the well meaning adults in their lives. There are very few examples of work in the world that is done as a solitary activity; whatever we do, we are almost always working as part of a team, the success of which depends on our ability to work together and bring out the best in one another. By acknowledging this reality and moving away from competition, control and outcomes we will reduce the harm being done in schools that erodes learning and wellbeing. By planning tasks and experiences to develop collaborative life skills, as well as their conceptual knowledge, we will be serving our students far more effectively for their future.
Building Communities: A support network where we grow together
A significant challenge to reimagining a system to support wellbeing is that those responsible for its implementation, the school leaders and teachers, were in their turn unprepared by their own education and training. Teachers around the world are more likely to teach the way they were taught as children than the way they were trained to teach (whatever that training may have been). This means that the work of systemic change is two fold; changing the hearts and minds of those maintaining the system (teachers and school leaders) and then changing the experience for those who the system serves (students). It is essential that when we reimagine the system, the service nature of school work is acknowledged, because only when the interests of the students are put ahead of everything else will it become easier to make any necessary changes. Incorporating a system of constructive feedback is therefore a very important part of the process. It is only when students and peers feel free to express their honest opinions without the fear of being singled out or reprimanded that a collaborative and non-judgmental environment can be cultivated in a classroom; students will take their lead from the way that they see teachers sharing feedback and best practice with each other.
Building Communities: Developing authentic values and skills, not hacks of navigating a mis-educational system.
In Doing School (2003) Denise Clark Pope examines, “how we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic, and miseducated students”, by teaching them what they need to do to succeed in our system of education rather than helping them meet their learning objectives or learn to be well, connected and collaborative. Using detailed interviews and observations of teens at High School in the US, she documents the journey of five ‘successful’ students. As Kevin, one of the participants in the study says, “People don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good grades, which brings them to college, which brings them the high-paying job, which brings them happiness, so they think. But basically, grades is where it’s at”.
Many of the aspects that erode wellbeing and undermine the well-intentioned messaging or interventions from schools and third-party providers are at their most prevalent in our ‘public’ (fee-paying) schools. In an educational landscape where over 60% of Indian parents choose to send their child(ren) to a fee-paying school, there are many schools trying to emulate public schools in the belief that this is what parents are looking for when choosing an education for their child. One only has to walk into the reception area of these schools or visit the principal’s office to see what success looks like. Trophies, prizes and honour boards adorn the walls and shelves, signalling down through time what matters and gives people meaning or value. Students too have been turned into walking CVs by the badges and ribbons that decorate their blazers, indicating where they sit in the hierarchy of the mis-educational system that they navigate their way through. The overall context of schools competing with each other, marketing their students’ performances or their infrastructure in order to top meaningless award charts is also indicative of the competitive slippery slope of the educational landscape.
Of course the people who won prizes in their day will argue that having something to strive for or someone to compete against made them work harder, train more and push further, but everyone else who did the same things didn’t win on the day. The lengths to which people work-around, negotiate, keep others down, manipulate and cheat to get what they want is breath-taking, precisely because the stakes, whether real or perceived, are so high. These behaviours will see people rusticated, fired, struck-off or facing prosecution if repeated in their universities, work place or profession; certainly not the education for life that is needed. Rather than celebrating conventional victories there is a need for positive role modelling through the stories of people who concentrated on the learning process, followed their passion and achieved other success. Rather than current students, who often hate being held up as examples because of hidden reactions of their peers, it is former students, parents and friends of the school who will be the best source of inspiration.
When faced with a critical examination of anything that challenges our world-view or way of doing things (habits and culture), we tend to (re)act to try and preserve it. Our auto-response is to defend, excuse or dismiss something as not being relevant to us, even when international, peer reviewed science is showing that many aspects of the education systems we work to create and maintain in so many schools are harming our students and staff. We have a moral responsibility as school leaders and teachers to respond and change those systems. Our experience, however, is that the recognition and desire for change will not come from the students themselves; they are doing everything they can to conform to the norms and unwritten rules of their schools. Nor will it come from the teachers who are doing the same and often expecting the counsellors or discipline policy to solve any problems that they or the students are having; framing the students as the problem. Without a thorough understanding of contextual wellbeing and the impact it has on community wellbeing, these stakeholders will be a source of resistance.
This is why it is essential to include the community in the work of learning about the need for contextual wellbeing, for creating the desire to change and for reimagining and crafting an environment that supports wellness and learning. This is where regular, research-based professional development is needed for the leadership team and teachers so that they come to share a vocabulary of wellness and understand the science behind any changes they agree are going to be made.
For most schools the community includes an interested body of parents, as well as teachers and students, so regular communication with them is needed to support the work being done to help them feel secure in the school’s aims and reassure them that their children are not merely part of an experiment in wellbeing. In our experience it is the current parents who are the greatest allies in the work of creating contextual wellbeing. Even those who believe that their child, “needs to toughen up a bit”, or that, “words don’t hurt”, soon change their tune when their child is unhappy and no longer willing to play along with their plans for them. As more schools make contextual wellbeing their priority, the education of parents will come from school leaders sharing what they are doing and why with prospective parents.
Our hope is that the obsession with easily measurable outcomes that predict little about a student’s future, or their capacity to respond positively to it with others, will diminish over the coming decade. We must all begin to recognise the awful irony for schools – of an external system, which includes parents, that measures their success through the competition for results and placements and also expects them to turn out graduates who are mentally healthy, collaborative, academically honest, kind and full of enthusiasm for learning.
As parents we need to be asking school leaders what they are doing to align their policies, protocol and practices with wellbeing and how they are minimising the harm of competition, judgment and comparison. Perhaps the most effective way to bring about the changes that students need is for parents to find the current system unacceptable and exercise their choice by sending their children to schools that make wellbeing and learning their focus rather than exam boards, prizes and positions. Of course, parents also need to make sure that their own messaging and behaviour contributes to wellbeing by recognising that home is part of the context. If they are as focused on grades, prizes and positions as school then they also need to educate themselves about the harm that this causes in the long run.
For some schools the community also includes alumni, whose experience and nostalgia, both individual and collective, add another layer to the context. Schools serve their current and future students while depending on their recent graduates for evidence of success and on their older alumni for the establishment of reputation and financial support. Sometimes these two groups, one looking forward to the future and one looking back to what was, have different interests. When the voices of the latter become louder, as they inevitably do, than those of the former, the school’s leadership and board need to work hard to educate them and remember that the long term future of the school is intrinsically linked to the wellbeing of the people there now and in the future; nostalgia isn’t fit for purpose in the 21st century, particularly when it comes to wellbeing.
Building Communities: Making it happen
In the closing chapter of her book, Street outlines a process cycle for school leaders and their communities that will help them move from wherever they find themselves now to wherever they want to be.
What we need to do to bring about a systemic change, based on Street’s research, is a four step collaborative, co-creation process where students, teachers and stakeholders bring their different perspectives to define a combined vision for the school.
- Review: Based on appreciative enquiry where the community is invited to define a positive change, discover what is working well, identify what is problematic.
- Articulate: Define of a vision for the community that embraces the best possible future.
- Plan: Design a plan to change policy, professional development and practice to move towards the vision for greater contextual wellbeing.
- Implement: Deliver and put it into practice.
The role of the school leader in this process is that of a facilitator, which includes communicating with the community, and particularly the parents, the whys, hows, whats, whens and whos of the process, as well as predicting the inevitable setbacks and celebrating successes in terms of the vision for contextual wellbeing.
To bring about changes that stick, leaders will also need to use the process to help bring on board those people of influence they know will find it difficult to buy into an alternative, better future because it would necessarily require them to acknowledge the harm that has been done through something that they have believed in and supported for so long. Of course, the introspection process for the leadership team themselves may also identify areas in which they find blind spots with respect to wellbeing and some help to work through these positively and authentically may be needed.
MR Ed Partners is a team of multi-disciplinary professionals who are working with schools to help them achieve contextual wellbeing through curriculum, policy, systems design and infrastructure. Do get in touch if you would like us to develop a bespoke plan with you and your school.
Bibliography… worth a read
Kohn, Alfie (1999) Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes.
Mission Australia & Black Dog Institute Youth Mental Health Report 2012-2016.
OECD (2017), “Students’ well-being: What it is and how it can be measured”, in PISA 2015 Results (Volume III): Students’ Well-Being , OECD Publishing, Paris.
Ofsetd (2019) Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers, No. 190034. www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ofsted.
Pope, Denise Clark (2003) Doing School: How we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic, and miseducated students. Yale University Press.
Seligman, M.E.P. et al. (2009), “Positive education: Positive psychology and classroom interventions”, Oxford Review of Education Vol. 35/3, pp. 293-311,
Street, Dr. Helen (2018), Contextual Wellbeing: Creating Positive Schools from the Inside Out. Wise Solutions.
World Health Organisation (2020), The Minsk Declaration The Life-course Approach in the Context of Health 2020. https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/289962/The-Minsk-Declaration-EN-rev1.pdf
