Wellbeing

In today’s podcast Femi and Matt discuss Wellbeing.  

After making the important distinction between wellbeing and workload they discuss

-          Attitudes to work
-          Being present – finding engagement with the task at hand
-          Meditation
-          Spiritual practice and gratitude
-          The effects of being asked to do meaningless or supercilious work
-          Socialising and social factors
-          Sport and the importance of physical activity
-          Truly meaningful relationships with colleagues and students: 
-          Community and comradery
-          Perfunctory token efforts to improve wellbeing vs substantial approaches by schools such as centralising behaviour systems.
-          Workload and sustainable practice including typical working patterns for each.
-          The importance of healthy, happy teachers for inspiring children’s flourishing.
-          Understanding the purposes of marking (AfL and feedback) and finding efficient ways to achieve those goals as opposed to just marking for the sake of it.
-          How poor behaviour impacts wellbeing, motivation, etc and the onus on schools to deliver better training on behaviour management 
-          Challenging things that aren’t very good, having the courage to say what you feel – and coming up with alternatives.  
-          And Inset days, and how to kill any kind of enthusiasm for being back in school.  Femi’s penchant for Team building activities, and other topics!

It was by no means an exhaustive conversation, and the issue of teacher wellbeing remains a serious and widely unresolved problem, however it's good to talk, and we hope you enjoy the discussion.