Well-Being in Schools

Three Forces That Will Uplift Your Students in a Volatile World

Andy Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416630746
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This timely resource for teachers, leaders, and policymakers provides breakthrough insights into how to improve students' well-being in schools.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, students' well-being was an increasingly prominent concern among educators, as issues related to mental health, global crises, and social media became impossible to ignore. But what, exactly, is well-being? What does it look like, why is it so important, and what can school systems do to promote it? How does it relate to student achievement and social and emotional learning?

World-renowned education experts Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley answer these questions and more in this in-depth exploration of the underlying ideas and research findings related to well-being, coupled with examples of policies and implementations from around the globe. The authors make the case for putting well-being ahead of other priorities, such as scores on high-stakes assessments, and explain the three powerful forces that educators can leverage to set up effective well-being policy and practice: prosperity for all, ethical technology use, and restorative nature.

Inspiring, thoughtful, and provocative, Well-Being in Schools: Three Forces That Will Uplift Your Students in a Volatile World offers hope in a time of unprecedented challenges. Looking within and beyond the classroom, it charts a path toward a lofty but achievable goal: improved well-being not only for students but also for society as a whole.

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Chapter 1

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What Is Well-Being? Why Does It Matter?

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Before 2020, if you'd asked people what first came to mind if you mentioned "the Who," they likely would have thought of the aging British rock band of that name. But another WHO—the World Health Organization—became a household name when it responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Created by the United Nations in 1947 as an organization responsible for global health issues, the WHO's constitution defined health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" (emphasis added).²¹ The WHO established new professions such as psychiatric social work and school counseling. Following World War II, it brought well-being onto the world stage alongside economic performance, peace, and global security.

Well-being is important in all areas of life, but especially in young people's development. We know that young people feel well when they enjoy their learning, look forward to coming to school, and feel valued by their families and friends. We all want them to experience joy, to thrive physically and emotionally, and to have a voice in their learning and their future.

It's not always immediately obvious when young people feel well, though. This is why well-being can be hard to measure sometimes. Well-being can be effervescent and expressive, but not all of us wear our heart on our sleeve. Well-being can just as easily be calm, reflective, and understated. Well-being might be manifested in a bursting sense of pride that accompanies an athletic accomplishment or a successful dramatic performance. But it can also be expressed in the quiet contentment found in reading an engrossing book or just playing quietly with a friend.

We're most likely to grasp the value of well-being when it's not there, when we witness all the signs of being ill instead. We notice when children are hungry or haven't slept. We are alert to young people being isolated, left out, or bullied. We have become increasingly vigilant about vulnerable children who are at risk of neglect or abuse at home. We provide specific help for young people with diagnosed conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, anxiety, or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. More and more schools and school systems have developed policies and strategies to deal with racism, homophobia, and other prejudices. And one of the basic competencies of teaching is to be able to be empathetic toward and supportive of children who have more transient experiences of ill-being such as losing a family member, experiencing the death of a pet, worrying about a parental breakup, or falling out with a best friend.

Well-being, happiness, and fulfillment are not just the icing on the cake of learning and achievement. As we will see in Chapter 8, they are essential to meeting academic goals. It's hard to be successful when you're tired, worried, hungry, fearful, or depressed. Conversely, breakthroughs in accomplishment and mastery can lead to surges in self-confidence and satisfaction.

In addition to their contribution to learning, well-being and fulfillment also have immense value in their own right. Mental health data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that the group whose well-being often suffered the most was teenagers.²² At a time in their lives when an important part of growing up is about being with friends and developing a sense of identity and hope for the future, teenagers were cut off from their peers in the neighborhood and from their teachers, mentors, and friends at school. For all the talk about online learning being able to be organized anywhere, anytime after the pandemic, the undeniable truth is that if physical schools are taken away, children and teenagers may become disconnected from many of the people who are important to them and their development. Well-being is an essential part of education and an invaluable part of growing up. We ignore it at our peril.

Learning to Be

Officially, and obviously, the prime purpose of education is not well-being, but learning. Understanding an intriguing idea, learning something new, developing a difficult skill, mastering a challenging concept—this seems to be the essence of education. It's what attracts many teachers into the profession—to switch on light bulbs for children, enable them to grasp or do something they thought was beyond them, help them progress, or introduce them to interests that can turn into lifelong passions.

But schools are not only about academic learning. They promote young people's emotional and moral development too. If we act as if learning and achievement are the only things that matter, we fall into the trap of what Dutch professor Gert Biesta calls learnification.²³

Learnification means that anything and everything has to be justified in terms of its impact on learning. Want to secure more time for music in your school? Then point to the evidence that music raises mathematics achievement. Interested in developing meditation and biofeedback among your children? Then demonstrate that the resulting calmness will improve performance on test-taking days. And if you are extending the school day, don't emphasize the value of being with peers, practicing leadership, or developing new interests. Just set out the evidence that extended learning time can increase measured achievement.

Alongside learning as we usually understand it, though, schools are also about how children develop. They are about how students experience and express awe, wonder, excitement, compassion, empathy, moral outrage at injustice, courage, playfulness, commitment, self-respect, self-confidence, and many other emotional and moral qualities in their education. Young people need to experience these things not just because of who they will become in the future but also because of who they are now.

In 1996, the United Nations established an education commission led by a former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors. Its report was titled Learning: The Treasure Within.²⁴ It built on a preceding UN report, issued 25 years earlier, called Learning to Be.²⁵ The Delors report made a powerful case for humanistic educational goals and purposes that, it claimed, had been overlooked and left behind.

The commission was concerned about growing unemployment, rising rates of exclusion, increasing inequality, and widespread damage to the natural environment. "All-out economic growth," it argued, "can no longer be viewed as the ideal way of reconciling material progress with equity, respect for the human condition and respect for the natural assets that we have a duty to hand on in good condition to future generations."²⁶ With these concerns uppermost, the Delors report began:

Education has a fundamental role to play in personal and social development. The Commission does not see education as a miracle cure or a magic formula opening the door to a world in which all ideals will be attained, but as one of the principal means available to foster a deeper and more harmonious form of human development and thereby to reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance, oppression and war.²⁷

The commission's report rested on four pillars of learning.²⁸ Learning to know involved engaging in a broad education and developing subject-specific knowledge. Learning to do was about acquiring skills and competencies, including modern skills such as teamwork that we now understand as representing global competencies. These two kinds of learning are what schools and universities have emphasized the most and can be easily examined and tested. However, Delors's team stressed, the other two pillars—learning to be and learning to live together—are at least as important in a rapidly changing and increasingly imperiled world. Yet they receive far less attention in formal educational systems.

Learning to be is about unearthing the buried treasure of people's hidden talents. These include "memory, reasoning power, imagination, physical ability, aesthetic sense, the aptitude to communicate with others."²⁹ Learning to be requires the development of essential "self-knowledge" among group leaders.³⁰

At a time when the collapse of the Berlin Wall had not put an end to national and international conflicts, the most important yet most neglected of all the four pillars, Delors argued, was learning to live together, to secure "mutual understanding, peaceful interchange and, indeed, harmony."³¹ Learning to live together amounted to developing "an understanding of others and their history, traditions and spiritual values and, on this basis, creating a new spirit which would induce people to implement common projects or to manage the inevitable conflicts in an intelligent and peaceful way."³²

On January 6, 2021, an insurrectionist mob stormed the US Capitol, tearing up the already fraying fabric of the nation's historic democracy. After the initial shock, who asked how Americans had failed to educate their citizens to learn to live together? Who regretted the decades-long atrophy of social studies and civics at the expense of more and more testing? Did technology executives in a digital industry dominated by white men accept responsibility for the profit-driven algorithms that divided people, reinforced their preferences and prejudices to communicate only with others like them, and spread sedition and hate?

Can Americans, and others of us in similarly compromised democracies, ask how we have failed to learn to live together? How can we put things right in our schools, technology and media companies, politics, and society? How can these divisions be healed with courage, empathy, truth, knowledge, critical thinking, and common cause? These things should be as much a part of the well-being agenda as mindfulness, self-regulation, positive mindsets, and resilience.

Learning to Be Well

The Delors report taught us that well-being is about more than feeling healthy, happy, mindful, or resilient. Nor is well-being only about feeling safe and protected from harm. It is not a purely psychological matter. Well-being is also a social condition that involves inclusion, belonging, peacefulness, and human rights. Strong well-being programs and policies see and secure the connections between the psychological states of children and the eventual state of the world. Well-being is a social as well as a psychological phenomenon. It's hard to be well if you live in a sick society.

Let's look at three examples of programs and policies that address both the social and psychological aspects of well-being and their interconnections. They are a high school history program that draws connections between bullying in schools and genocide; an elementary education initiative that develops empathy among young people as a basis for peace in society; and a systemwide policy on child well-being that is a central pillar for also developing excellence, inclusion, and equity.

Facing History and Ourselves

If the broader argument about well-being and society feels like something that belongs only in a world history course or in a peace education curriculum, it is important to acknowledge that the capacity for global conflict begins in our families and communities. At times, it has also been exacerbated in the classrooms and hallways of our schools. This is the essential insight of a curriculum initiative developed in Brookline, Massachusetts, that is now recognized and used all over the world. Its name is Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO).³³

In 1974, Margot Stern Strom and William Parsons, two secondary school social studies teachers in Brookline, found themselves dissatisfied with how their students were learning about the Holocaust. Try as they might, they felt that their students approached the horrors of genocide almost as if it were any other school subject that needed to be mastered for the college admissions grind. Strom and Parsons acquired a grant to develop a program that would "link a particular history to universal questions, those timely yet timeless questions that resonate with every generation."³⁴

Strom became the founder and executive director of FHAO. She later wrote that she wanted "students to confront not only their own potential for passivity and complicity, but also their courage and resilience. And we must teach them to value their rights as citizens and take responsibility for their actions."³⁵

In April 1978, NBC television released a miniseries, Holocaust, that was viewed by more than 120 million people, many of them secondary school students.³⁶ Strom and her colleagues wanted to respond to the newfound interest in the Nazis' ge...