Keeping well, teaching well: supporting wellbeing of learning and teaching staff

Development needs of learning and teaching staff are changing and support for wellbeing has emerged as a key area in which support needs to be available, a topic we saw as a key priority at the University of Strathclyde and one that deserved the attention of our Academic Development Team.

This session will describe a 10-week online programme to support wellbeing of teachers that has been successfully implemented at Strathclyde.

We will discuss the drivers for implementing this wellbeing programme, which include signs of stress, discomfort and exhaustion that we saw in our staff, using the exhaustion funnel as a model to describe this. We will also make participants aware of the link between wellbeing and teacher attrition as a key driver of the importance of supporting wellbeing of teachers.

We will present the topics explored within our programme, how we implemented the programme, what worked, and how we tweaked the programme across the three iterations of the programme that have now been offered.

Through this we will explore the importance of,
•Safe and supportive spaces for teaching staff to discuss and develop responses to challenges they experience;
•Offering staff opportunities of a variety of ways to support their wellbeing and to develop wellbeing action plans;
•Supporting staff to develop and maintain their own wellbeing so that they can in turn support student wellbeing, supporting a whole-university wellbeing approach; and
•Informal discussion spaces for peer wellbeing support.

We will capture the attention of participants by including a micro-wellbeing exercise at the beginning of the session to recognize the importance of wellbeing to being ready to learn.