What’s Good for Student Well-Being is Often Good for You
What’s Good for Student Well-Being is Often Good for You
When it comes to supporting student well-being, you’re in luck. What’s good for kids is often good for adults. We can build environments and experiences that promote health and healing for everyone. Doing so creates cultures of care in our classrooms while simultaneously optimizing conditions for student learning.
Through words and actions, students ask us for love, care, understanding, patience, connection, novelty, and opportunity.
Prioritizing well-being is more important than ever. We are years into schools being at the center of global crises, culture wars, mass shootings, and other forms of instability. Combined with more routine stressors, it’s easy to see why teachers and students are experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety, and trauma. These experiences get in the way of students and staff being able to live, learn, and thrive.?
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To prioritize well-being in classrooms, we can take cues from kids. Their rhythms and requests reveal a lot about what everyone needs—individually and collectively. Through words and actions, students ask us for love, care, understanding, patience, connection, novelty, and opportunity. Often, their needs reflect our own.
Resiliency is having what it takes to keep going when times are tough, but well-being is bigger. It encompasses the whole of what people need cognitively, socially, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually. The experience of well-being is highly interdependent on where we spend time and who we spend time with. Students do better when their teachers are well. And vice versa.
As we head into the final stretch of the school year, consider ways to pursue well-being. Tune into kids’ cues for care with curiosity. Commit to a daily or hourly cycle of observation, reflection, and response. Which needs emerge most often? If students need more patience, what does that say about your patience? If students are bored, where can you build in novelty? When student well-being improves, what happens to your own?
Keep track of what you see, what you do, and what happens to student behaviors, classroom culture, and the quality of learning. Every day, you spend hours with students, sharing space and being in community together. You owe it to them and yourself to prioritize well-being. Not only will it promote health and wellness, but it will optimize conditions for learning and work, and make the school experience more enjoyable overall.?