‘Teacher well-being’ at ETC
Awareness: Teacher Well-being By Viorica Barbu
T
he purpose of the session Awareness: Teacher Well-being which I held at the 2024 EARCOS Teachers’ Conference (ETC) was to bring educators together to explore areas of personal wellbeing that influence their work lives and identify resources that could support them. This goal was broken down into three parts: bringing awareness to personal beliefs about well-being and selfcare, exploring areas of our lives that influence our well-being, and designing one small self-care step that participants could put into practice in order to improve their well-being. Some of the resources we used in our explorations were the Designing Your Life framework created by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans from Stanford University, which involves looking at four aspects of one’s life–work, love, play, and health (Burnett & Evans, 2018), and the Wheel of Life model from Peopleconnexion (Jean Kilner, 2019). However, it became apparent that, even when teachers are deeply aware of their own needs and try their best to take good care of themselves, they might still not be at their optimal level of well-being. Sharing our struggles and insights was, perhaps, the most important part of the session, highlighting our common humanity. Many of the questions asked were about workload and trying to fit it all in and about finding ways to have a better work-life balance. Some participants wondered whether it was actually possible to do that.
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EARCOS Triannual Journal