Addressing Educator Wellness

Addressing Educator Wellness: The Difference Between Surviving and Thriving.

Diane Wynne, Ed.D.

Diane Wynne

is the director of wellness and equity at Rush-Henrietta CSD. She is also currently a leadership coach and mentor, who served as an Assistant Principal and School Psychologist. Diane is a national presenter and is passionate about developing and facilitating workshops on trauma-informed systems, social-emotional learning, restorative practices, equity and inclusion, and wellness. She can be reached at Education DWynne@gmail.com.

The mental health and wellness of students has long been a concern of educators and educational leaders who recognize that student mental health is crucial to learning and the overall social-emotional development of essential skills. However, these past few years have also made it clear that the mental health of our educators who work with students has been tested in countless ways and also needs to be addressed. Educational systems are at a crucial tipping point with teachers and other educational professionals leaving the profession at alarming rates. In a SAANYS Vanguard magazine article, I discussed the impact of COVID-19 on educational leaders and offered suggestions for ensuring our mental health as school and district leaders; I would like to shift my focus for this article on ways to support teachers and other school and district staff.

The importance of trauma-informed practices, which focus on understanding the impact of trauma on individuals, cannot be overstated. However, I suggest that we shift our focus to being trauma-responsive, which takes our understanding of the impacts of trauma and translates that into specific actions that address the aftermath of trauma and its continuing ramifications. Conveying both our understanding and compassion for others through providing specific supports is essential within our school districts, especially during these challenging times.

Too often, the wellness of teachers and other school district staff goes overlooked, not because leaders don’t care, but because they are unsure how to best support the range of staff members working in their schools and departments. Students suffer when the adults who teach them and work with them are struggling to maintain their own mental health in the face of anxiety and stress during tumultuous times. For educational leaders facing the challenge of determining how to best support staff mental health and wellness, I offer the following suggestions of ways in which I have worked with my district to address this challenge as the Director of Wellness and Equity:

Think “outside the box” when offering supports for staff

While providing staff breakfasts or treats in staff mailboxes is always a nice gesture, it doesn’t get at the complexity of what our educators have been through these past few years. With the understanding that we don’t know what will best help our staff if we don’t ask them directly, I have developed and administered mental health surveys every summer in my school district since the pandemic began. These surveys are sent to junior high and high school students, parents, and staff members. In our staff surveys, we directly ask staff what options they would like our district to consider in order to provide support to them. A range of options such as virtual exercise classes, mindfulness sessions, and community building circles are offered. Staff input helps to drive our decisions about ways in which we can address wellness that will best support others. Results of these surveys led to virtual mindfulness classes offered with over 300 staff participating. This school year, we have offered staff chair massages at all of our ten schools, in addition to our other buildings including our administration building and our transportation building, among others.

The response we received from staff was overwhelmingly positive. As a district, we believe that although we know that a short chair massage is not going to solve every challenge that our staff are dealing with, we want them to know we heard what they asked for, we care about them, and we want to offer a chance for them to experience a new relaxation technique that they may not have tried before. As leaders, we must remember to never underestimate the power of eliciting staff feedback, expressing care, and reminding ourselves that unprecedented times call for new and innovative wellness supports for those who have remained committed to serving our children in the face of major obstacles and stressors.

Make sure you are role modeling and supporting healthy mental health practices and social-emotional learning competencies for staff and students

Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a major focus of school districts, with the expectation that teachers will be supporting the development of SEL competencies in students. I often read about how to develop students’ social-emotional learning, with no recommendations offered about fostering these skills in our staff. CASEL’s five competencies include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, all areas which have been deeply impacted by the stress and collective trauma of COVID-19 and other challenging local and world events in recent years.

As leaders, we must remember to never underestimate the power of eliciting staff feedback, expressing care, and reminding ourselves that unprecedented times call for new and innovative wellness supports for those who have remained committed to serving our children in the face of major obstacles and stressors.

Thinking about ways to engage staff in self-reflection about their personal strengths and needs in the area of social-emotional learning is paramount to their ability to address these skills in their students. In our district, we have identified SEL coaches in all of our district schools this year to lead the work of ensuring district-wide, consistent SEL implementation and to support both students and staff. Creating these new SEL coaching positions has been effective in providing leadership roles for individuals who have strengths in this area to be creative in their approach to fostering social-emotional learning in their schools. It has also made it clear to our community that we prioritize the development of healthy social-emotional skills in both children and adults.

Focus on enhancing staff capacity to support student emotional and behavioral needs

Our district mental health surveys made it evident that our teachers and additional staff members felt anxiety about meeting the increased emotional and behavioral needs of students. As a result, our district has provided extensive professional development workshops on the topics of trauma-responsive strategies, de-escalation techniques, shifting mindsets about student behaviors, and making connections with students. These workshops have focused on the factors that we are able to control such as our mindsets about students, how we approach situations, and the words we choose to use in challenging situations. Because our approach to mental wellness includes all of our district staff, we have developed specific workshops on these topics for additional departments and groups including transportation, food service, and paraprofessionals.

As leaders, we must remember that many other adults interact with our students on a daily basis other than classroom teachers, and these groups also deserve the same supports and workshops to enhance their skills that are offered to our educators. Our annual wellness workshop, which offered specific strategies on trauma-responsive approaches for children and teenagers, was open to all staff, parents, and community members and provided an additional source of support and vital information for those working with children.

Look for ways to partner with community agencies to provide additional support for your staff.

When we began to see the impacts of mental health struggles on our district staff, we started to realize how many people needed someone to talk to and were unable to obtain this support. As many agencies struggled

to keep up with the demand for therapy, individuals were being placed onto long waitlists. Wanting to remove barriers for our staff, we reached out to an agency that we are already affiliated with and were able to secure counseling spots to be allocated only for our district employees. This enabled district staff to quickly access counseling through virtual sessions. Often, these partnerships already exist in school districts and thinking creatively helps us to see new ways to expand and enhance supports to reach a greater number of individuals.

Restorative practices are an essential component of healthy school districts, especially during these challenging times.

School districts who have used restorative practices to build connections and restore relationships know what an excellent tool it is for individual classrooms and for schools and districts overall. Community-building circles facilitated by staff can provide safe spaces for students to process challenging topics. They are also useful for gauging where students are at with their own mental well being and assessing what supports may be most helpful. Having students identify their feelings on a chart or share their challenges and successes for dealing with stress provide both a safe environment for them to share these personal thoughts and also provide important information for teachers.

Source: Rush-Henrietta CSD

These community-building circles are also extremely valuable for adults to participate in as well. In my district, I had the fortunate experience of facilitating circles with bus drivers and bus monitors, which was a powerful experience. The time together helped individuals to learn about their similarities and work through differences in political viewpoints and stressful world events. We all left with a greater understanding of each other and a closer sense of community and belonging, which are essential for positive workplace wellness.

Encourage your staff and students not to compare stress with others or minimize their own feelings.

None of us is immune to the stress we experience due to personal and professional challenges. However, I often hear teachers say that they don’t have a right to feel depressed because “others have it worse” or “I can’t complain, I still have a job”. Although gratitude and maintaining perspective and empathy for others are extremely important traits, it can sometimes lead to individuals downplaying what they are going through because the situations of others seem more difficult. When people don’t recognize their struggles, they are apt to not address them, which can lead to increased mental health challenges. Educational leaders need to encourage staff to recognize that COVID-19 is a “collective trauma” that has impacted everyone in one way or another. As we often tell students, everyone has a right to their feelings; how we cope with our feelings for our own wellness and the mental health and wellness of others is what matters most.

In my view, the most important thing to remember is that the old saying, ‘What we don’t know won’t hurt us” is far from the truth. Effectively addressing staff mental health and wellness requires developing ways to elicit input on the supports that will most help, ensuring funding to provide those supports, and frequently checking in with those who have the most important job of teaching our children. A range of supports should be considered so that educators are able to choose the ones which will best meet their needs during these challenging times. In addition, reminding ourselves as leaders that the impacts of trauma can last many years and that we will need to continue to support educators in creative ways is imperative. If there is a lesson to be learned from the extremely challenging past few years, it’s that the mental health of students can only be fostered when we first consider the mental health of the adults who teach them, feed them, drive them to and from school, and encourage them each and every day.

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