Education
In this episode, Claire interviews Suneta Bagri: a mindset coach. Suneta has over 20 years’ worth of experience in education including being in a headteacher role for four years. Together, they discuss how Suneta always felt that she was a spiritual person knowing that she wanted to be a teacher from a very early age. She gained an interest in personal development aged 18 and this is something that she carried with her throughout her career. She talks of overcoming adversity and regaining a passion for education at University through the support of her siblings. Suneta defines personal development as a commitment for self-improvement and states she has a solution-focused approach when she wants to achieve something. Her current work centres around developing a mindset towards what you want. What do I want? How do I get it? How am I going to make it happen? They discuss the signs and symptoms of burnout explaining that senior leadership teams must be aware of this to help the teacher retention crisis. She explains that many people are talking about the crisis but not doing anything about it. In 2018 she decided that the wellbeing of teachers had to be first and foremost and wanted to create a movement that puts a focus on the wellbeing of teachers. Claire and Suneta explore how mentalities and opinions towards stress and wellbeing have improved over time. Teachers are becoming more open-minded towards innovative approaches to improving wellbeing. Suneta’s workshops focus on self-care, burn out and indicators of stress: all key steps to developing mindset and improving wellbeing. She explains that senior leadership teams must see the value of coaching so that the whole staff make an investment into the concept. This opens a framework of discussion which will help to make a larger positive impact. KEY TAKEAWAYS To improve teacher retention, staff should feel valued. Where a school is committed to your wellbeing, it will show in the way you are communicated with and respected. The headteacher must set the tone to have the biggest impact in school. Senior leadership teams should have a compassionate attitude towards staff. Teachers will go to the moon and back for them if they see that they are cared about. High levels of respect result in ‘buy in’ from staff. Stress can be difficult to identify. Teachers need the self-care tools to identify and manage stress. It might be shown is when marking and planning is not kept up to date or behaviour management becomes a struggle. Other indicators include having stomach ache and nausea or headaches and migraines. Remember that people are managing stress on a daily basis – both personal and in the classroom. Burnout factors. Causes of burnout include workload, a lack of control and a lack of reward. Lack of control could be both in personal life or at work. Lack of reward may be not feeling acknowledged which can dampen spirits. It may also include unfair acknowledgement of other staff members such as promotions, pay rises or other perks. Teachers may experience a conflict of values. Staff go into teaching because they love the children but are often told that the focus is achieving the data and the results. This can result in feeling conflicted with what’s important to the teachers and what’s important to the leaders. A clear understanding of wellbeing. Wellbeing is ‘feeling well consistently for the majority of your day’. It is about being able to bounce back from setback and knowing that you will be okay. It is important not to confuse kind gestures from senior leaders as ‘wellbeing’. Self-assessment is important. Asking yourself why am I doing this? What are you doing to nourish and care for yourself? Know yourself as a person and what wellbeing means to you. If you don’t have the balance, how are you going to get it? Enforce your boundaries: be firm with yourself and say ‘I’m not actually going to mark after 6pm’. BEST MOMENTS “Commitment to self-improvement. That’s really what it is. It’s about having an evolving mindset which is going to make you better as a person.” “We’re people first and professionals second.” “There’s lots of different areas of personal development, but your starting point would be your health because your physical health and your mental health is really your sustenance. So everything that you eat, everything you drink, the way that you move, the way you look after your body – that is all personal development” “You need to have a very open and transparent nature in a school.” “What can be one of the most difficult things for even colleagues to realise is that people are managing stress on a daily basis and we all do and sometimes that stress can be adrenaline: it’s a healthy stress. Where it’s healthy, we can kind of feel nervous… maybe we’re delivering CPD or maybe we’re seeing parents.” “Hierarchy exists. We can’t shy away from it. But that hierarchy shouldn’t be felt. And I think that’s where you get the most success in schools from my experience.” “On a plane you put your own oxygen mask on first and, when you do that, you can look after your own children if you’ve got children. But, it’s no different for teachers.” “Outstanding teaching is when you let the teachers be the leaders of their own learning. And if you’re not in a position to do that, you’re constantly feeling a lack of control.” “Wellbeing is also different for different people. So I can’t tell you what wellbeing should look like for you. All I can say to you is that wellbeing is going to be that you feel good about your life the majority of the time.” “You are your most important responsibility. The most important relationship you have is with yourself.” VALUABLE RESOURCES Suneta’s Website: https://sunetabagri.com/ The Every Teacher Matters Network: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/every-teacher-matters-network-tickets-76824765943 Christina Maslach Burnout Inventory: https://maslach.socialpsychology.org/ Author of ‘You Can Heal Your Life’: https://www.louisehay.com/ The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/ Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/ Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/ LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/ ABOUT THE HOST Claire Riley Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide. Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff. Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.