At its heart, education is about people helping people – to learn. Teaching happens when others learn. That is why relationships are at the heart of what teachers do every day in almost 4,000 schools with close to 1 million children and young people. If teaching and learning are rooted in how we relate to each other as people, then wellbeing is the keystone in the bridge that supports learning. Wellbeing, in other words, is central to good teaching and learning.
Teachers know this themselves instinctively. The Teaching Council has hosted two panel discussions on wellbeing at FÉILTE (Festival of Education in Learning and Teaching Excellence) in 2013 and 2014. Both discussions clearly resonated with all those who were in attendance, teachers and parents alike. It was clear from these events that teachers are keen to avail of every opportunity for quality provision to empower them to nurture their own wellbeing.
In this light, it is worth noting that Conor Cusack, mental health advocate and former Cork hurler, has spoken of;
“..the vital role our teachers have to fulfil in supporting our students to be true and real to themselves. For that to happen though, we need to support through opportunities for self-reflection and growth for our teachers to be real and true to themselves. A teacher can only ever bring a student to the same level of maturity they have attained themselves. Reflection is the sine qua non for maturity and true inner progress.”
To be clear, we are not starting from ground zero. I have heard of teachers who are engaging in their own professional learning in the area of wellbeing and who speak of how much it has helped them both personally and professionally. I have heard of teachers who have fully integrated mindfulness into their daily professional practice. In fact, one of them, Anita Fennelly, from the Heath in Co. Laois, will be speaking at FÉILTE on 3 October later this year.
When I visited her school earlier in the year, I had the privilege of listening to the pupils in sixth class describe in their own words how she had integrated mindfulness into their daily routine. They talked for an hour about the impact of this on their lives – how it helped them in their relationships with siblings; how they felt it would help them in the transition to post-primary. They were clear that the skills they had acquired would give them the resilience they need to deal with life’s inevitable disappointments, as well as its golden moments.
So we know that this can be done, and we know that teachers want to do it. What they need is space and time – space and time for themselves as reflective practitioners, and space and time to avail of the many opportunities that are available to engage in professional learning in this area.
We know that there are organisations in the public and private sector who offer support, guidance and opportunities for professional learning in the area of wellbeing. We also have guidelines for wellbeing in primary and post-primary schools, as well as Connecting for Life – Ireland’s National Strategy to Reduce Suicide 2015-2020. This comes on top of curricular provision at both primary and post-primary level.
We have the strategy, the plans and we have organisations who are working hard to make a reality of those plans. What more do we need to do? Firstly, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, we need to connect, connect again, connect better. And secondly, based on feedback from teachers, we need to empower them to work with parents and young people to help each other to truly flourish.
Over the past few years, I have been fortunate to speak to teachers, parents and others about wellbeing and its role in supporting teaching and learning, and wider social progress. As I reflect now on those conversations, a number of common threads are evident:
- Regardless of our background or profession, we all care deeply about the wellbeing of each other. We believe that this is of vital importance to our society as a whole. We have a growing confidence that we can make a step change in how we think, talk and act about wellbeing. We also understand that for this step change to happen, we need to enhance how we work with each other across all sectors.
- We know that teaching touches the lives of every single person in a way that no other profession does. For that reason, we understand that teachers have a key role to play in supporting the wellbeing of our children and young people. But we also realise that parents and the wider community have an equally important role to play. As the proverb says, it takes a village to raise a child.
In other words, teaching is not being all things to all people, or pretending to be what we are not. Teaching – in the most practical, human sense, is about connecting – connecting to the wider world, and connecting with our inner selves. It’s about enabling others to connect themselves across space and time in a way that paradoxically makes us all whole.
We need to be both practical and brave, to be realistic yet aspirational. We have no guarantees of success, but we surely have so many reasons to hope. The demand is too great, and the stakes are too high, to allow for anything other than progress. The future of our society depends on it.