There is a tendency to see teacher wellbeing and student wellbeing as competing concerns in school leadership and culture. What teacher wellbeing and student wellbeing have in common is the perception by teachers that they are an ‘add on’ to the principal agenda of academic performance. Initiatives tackling teacher wellbeing are often experienced as piecemeal, and are inconsistent with the overall culture of teacher’s professional expectations in schools (Brady & Wilson, 2021) – for example, a short mindfulness course offered alongside a general CPD (continuing professional development) focus on teaching for ‘performance’.
Our research with teachers (Wilson et al., 2023) has found that teachers subsequently experience a sense of incoherence and confusion around how wellbeing fits in as a priority in their work: we found tensions in teachers’ understandings of the aim of teaching, as ‘doing well’ at the expense of ‘being well’, despite their conviction that to authentically ‘do well’, students and teachers need to ‘be well’ as a foundation.
While education for wellbeing is often portrayed as learning a set of knowledge and skills to be obtained by individuals to support their resilience, our study with teachers matched other findings (see for example Billington et al., 2022) which highlight the relational nature of wellbeing in teachers’ understanding and practice. Here, the notion of teaching as care work comes to the fore.
The caring role in teaching is theorised by Noddings as ‘a web of care’ (Noddings, 2013, p. xiii), in which care is understood to be dialogic, requiring a response from a student or ‘cared-for’ which buffers the teacher’s own wellbeing. Care is also multi-directional: education staff give and receive care from each other. This perspective is in tension with CPD and secondary teacher training which almost exclusively foregrounds the role of teachers in academic performance.
