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Focus Question:  Does learning about and practicing self-care concepts help to improve teacher well-being?

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Let's face it. Teachers have one of the most demanding jobs on the planet due to stress. One of the biggest and often unmentioned problems or stressors that face teachers today is that they are not addressing their own well-being and, in turn, this can contribute to them having both professional and personal burn-out.  This LISD Leadership Action Research Project was conducted to bring some light into this area in the hope that it might help teachers better address taking care of themselves in order to help them reach their full potential both professionally and personally.  This project was worked on collaboratively with Tracie Kroenert, Wellington Elementary Counselor and Linda Ryan, Wellington Elementary Teacher.  One of us took mental health and the other took physical health and we combined our information.

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Teaching can be an intensive job and educators can greatly benefit from learning about and practicing their own self-care. Unfortunately, teachers worry that taking care of themselves can distract them from their students. However, taking care of yourself, as a teacher, can not only help personally, but it can also help professionally.  In fact, practicing self-care can be in the best interest of everyone in your classroom. Self-care is all about taking care of your physical and mental health in order to making sure that you have everything you need to thrive as a teacher and as a person. Without taking care of yourself, you won’t have the energy to help your students.  After all, if teachers don't take care of themselves, how can they take care of others?
With that in mind, we did a baseline test from Berkeley on ourselves to see where we fell so that we could use that information to meet teachers where they were in our research.  That baseline research gave us some ideas on where to begin in creating our own pre/post survey for our teachers and it also gave us a link to provide our teachers for future reference.

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Berkeley Well-Being Quiz & Well-Being Institute

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Berkeley Well-Being Quiz & Well-Being Institute

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Please utilize the links below to explore the multiple aspects of your well-being.

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Strategies & Best Practices in Self-Care

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Strategies & Best Practices in Self-Care

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During the time we conducted the research, from March 2020 until May of 2020, we sent out weekly self-care activities and articles for the teachers to participate in using many different modalities.  We put ideas in mailboxes, put items up at school, helped to participate in the redesigning of the school lounge, sent out monthly ideas and bingo games, sent out emails and sent out a weekly self-care SMORE.  Unfortunately, we had not accounted for the current COVID-19 situation and this played a major factor in our research toward the end.  With instruction moving from the classroom to online, it put much more stressors on teachers and thus emphasized the need for teacher self-care.  We noticed that and put more information in our weekly SMORE about giving yourself grace and time. A few examples are below.

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Here is the survey we created and used as a pre/post test for our teachers to help us/them determine where they were on the self-care scale.

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Here are the results of our pre-survey on teacher well-being and self-care at Wellington ES.

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Based on the pre-survey, the data overall shows that all participants had a good working knowledge of how to maintain physical and mental health.  This was evidenced by the question and data on a good work-life balance, a positive mental well-being outlook, thinking positively, meaningful relationships, knowing what physical exercise make them feel better, the right foods to eat and finally the positive attitudes toward effort and new ideas about self-care.  Areas of need based on data were:  ways to calm in high areas of stress, how to stay present in every moment, actually voluntarily engaging in physical activity, and staying hydrated. This shows that there were 2 areas of need in mental self-care and 2 areas of need in physical self-care.

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Based on the survey, we focused a lot of our information on the areas of need based on the data in the survey. Below you will see some examples of the things we sent out. We did not send out the entire survey due to teachers being overwhelmed with COVID-19 and online learning. We did not want to defeat the purpose of implementation of self-care by addition of more for them to do. Therefore, we focused on the 4 questions where the data of the post-survey showed improvement was needed. Calming/mindfulness, staying present, motivation to exercise and hydration. There was improvement in these areas as the data will show but it is felt that this study and the data is skewed based on what happened with us moving to all online instruction so quickly and remaining there for the remainder of the year.

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Based on our research, it was shown that teachers need reminders to take care of themselves and ideas to make that happen.  We hope to continue with some form of this into the future.  Our lounge is also being revamped to help with teacher self-care.  It was also very beneficial to work together as a counselor/teacher team to address physical and mental needs on campus.

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This research was conducted from March until May. While the time frame was not a complete year, as desired, results were evident. Those results were that teachers have an idea of what self-care is and maybe even a desire to participate. However, encouragement was needed and there were areas we could help with concepts and ideas by sending out information, ideas, encouraging notes, redoing the lounge and more.  The results of this study can and will vary each year,  based on staff change, campus climate and culture, the result of the current COVID-19 situation and more.   THANK YOU for taking the time to look into the Wellington Teacher Self-Care Action Research and for considering it for further implementation in the future.