Wow! eBook
Every Teacher Matters: Inspiring Well-Being through Mindfulness
Author(s): Kathryn Lovewell (Author)
- Publisher: Ecademy Press
- Publication Date: 18 Sept. 2012
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 218 pages
- ISBN-10: 190874636X
- ISBN-13: 9781908746368
Book Description
Teachers are the most valuable resource in Education. Why is it that so little investment is made in supporting teachers to ensure they can sustain effective teaching and learning in the classroom? What if we were to invest time and energy back into the core of education, the teachers? What if we were to publicly express how valuable teachers really are? What if we lived in a society that made emotional health and well-being in the workplace a priority? What if we lived in a world where emotional intelligence was prioritised over any other subject so that learning could be accessed more easily and effortlessly? With humour, anecdote, and a wealth of background research, Every Teacher Matters offers a gentle hand to guide teachers – and through them, their students back to their hearts!
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Kathryn specialises in emotional resilience, having taught inside and outside mainstream education for the last 20 years. She trains Senior Leaders, Teachers, NQTs (and students) to manage their stress healthily and to effectively cope with the ever increasing emotional and psychological demands of teaching. Kathryn’s mission is to reduce stress in schools and promote well being.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword A gradual and much needed change is taking place in the values and aspirations of many governments. No longer is GDP or economic growth their sole aim and the only indicator of progress. ere is a growing acceptance that improving the well-being of citizens is at least as important as GDP, and arguably more so. It is increasingly widely recognised that economic growth is not an end in itself, but a means to an end – and that end is well-being. Some commentators equate well-being with happiness, but it is more than happiness. Well-being is about living life well – about developing our full potential as individuals and in relationship with others, and contributing to our society. Well-being, in short, is about flourishing. Imagine an organisation, a society, or a nation, most of whose mentors were ourishing. Such a group would be characterised by creativity and innovation, by good health and vitality, by harmonious relationships, and by care for all living beings and the needs of future generations. is is the vision and aspiration proposed by the recent UN High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-being, which took place on 2 April 2012. The UN is advocating a new economic paradigm with well-being at its core. How can we make progress towards this vision? The most effective way, surely, is to equip our children with the skills to live life well – with the skills to flourish. Academic knowledge and traditional educational content have an important role to play, but a whole child approach is crucial if we want our children to flourish. We must consider not just their cognitive development, but their emotional, social, moral and spiritual development. And because each child is unique, we must consider their individual interests and passions, their strengths and talents – their inner spark. This is not new. The rhetoric that “every child matters” has had currency for some time in the educational context. What is new is its growing prominence in the broader social context, and the growing determination to move from rhetoric to making it a reality. This is where Kathryn Lovewell’s book has such a powerful role to play. If every child matters, then it must follow as night follows day that every teacher matters. In most developed countries, children will have spent in excess of 10,000 hours at school, and this provides an unparalleled opportunity to nurture the whole child, and to develop their full potential to live life well. But harnessing this opportunity requires that we take care of our teachers. For children to flourish, we need teachers who are flourishing. This book describes the many barriers to teacher flourishing in our current educational systems, but its core message is a simple, evidence-based approach that promotes flourishing. The practice of mindfulness in the teacher’s own life, and its extension to mindful teaching, can be transformative. Mindfulness is a particular way of paying attention to what is going on in the moment in the mind, in the body and in our immediate surroundings. We learn to pay attention to our experiences with curiosity and with kindness – kindness towards ourselves and others. These qualities help to create clarity about what we are experiencing, and to respond appropriately rather than reacting automatically. Some teachers seem naturally to embody mindfulness, and it almost certainly makes them ne teachers. But mindfulness is a set of skills that can be learnt by all. These skills are described in a highly approachable and delightful way in Lovewell’s book. There can be no doubt that practising these skills and becoming a mindful individual and a mindful teacher, has the power to transform the teaching experience and the lives of the children we entrust to our teachers for all those thousands of hours. The promotion of flourishing through mindful education may contribute in no small way to realising the UN vision of a world characterised by sustainable well-being. Felicia A Huppert Professor of Psychology Director of the Well-being Institute University of Cambridge
