Скачать или смотреть Teacher wellbeing: Managing conflict, workload and emotional challenges

🏫Teachers help shape the conditions for future generations to learn, thrive, and grow into healthy, happy adults. School life can be incredibly rewarding, but it can also, at times, feel overwhelming. Between heavy workloads, navigating relationships with students, parents and colleagues, and the emotional demands of the role, teachers’ own needs can be pushed aside, taking a toll on their mental health.

In the webinar, we talked about some of the pressures of working in primary and secondary schools, and shared approaches to help manage stress, prevent burnout, and handle conflict in a healthy way.

Psychotherapist and former teacher Osian Leader shared insights from psychological theory, his experience in schools, and his work supporting education professionals to shine a light on why these challenges can feel so overpowering and what teachers can do to look after themselves and others when things are tough.

It was also great to have Jack Newton with us, a previous Headteacher and current leader, and to hear his reflections on staff wellbeing, boundaries, and the realities of school life.

Conflict: What's really happening

“In a conflict situation, if someone feels undermined or feels they need to defend themselves to reestablish higher ground, they will try to make you feel guilty and blame you for everything. Worst of all, they will try to make you feel shameful.

When people feel defensive in this way, it calls their own history into question. They start to repeat things that were difficult for them in their past. The intention behind defending themselves is a survival reaction rather than a problem-solving one. They feel undermined by something that has gone wrong, and their insecurity drives them into behaviours that are not very helpful”

To-do lists: From “should” to “could”

“I should have done that. Why did it go wrong? What is happening is that we are punishing ourselves and pushing ourselves into a place where we feel trapped. We are not being present about it. It is all about the past and the future, which brings anxiety because we cannot control the past.

When things become difficult, we need to try to change the word should to could. If you think about it in a sentence, for example I should do something compared with I could do something, it changes the nature of the sentence entirely”

Jack shared an honest reminder of the pressures within the profession and how important it is for educators to protect their own wellbeing.

"Here's the reality around teaching. There isn't a single teacher in the history of the United Kingdom, in the history of Wales, that has ever completed all their tasks. It's just never been done. we've got to be better at looking after ourselves so we're better at looking after people. We are very good at pretending everything's fine"

Platfform Wellbeing offer a range of workplace wellbeing support for staff and young people, including training around mental health such as burnout, stress and more, as well as supervision, counselling, and helpful resources.
Find out more: https://www.platfformwellbeing.com/ed...