• Industrial psychologist Dr. Chintha Dissanayake on the importance of improving teacher wellbeing

Can the improvement of teacher wellbeing, through initiatives like talent development and career coaching, extend beyond the teachers themselves and have a positive impact on students and learning environments? This is a question explored by industrial psychologist Dr. Chintha Dissanayake, who carried out three studies in Europe and found that coaching initiatives led to a significant boost in staff wellbeing and the overall performance of the school.

While Dr. Dissanayake’s work is based on schools in Belgium and the United Kingdom (UK), in conversation with The Daily Morning Brunch, she pointed out that these interventions can be carried out in Sri Lanka as well.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

Tell us about the work you do.

I’m an industrial psychologist. In the United Kingdom, we are referred to as occupational psychologists, whereas in the States, we are industrial or organisational psychologists. I typically work with companies, where they bring in someone like me to help them understand their people better; remember, where there are people, there are always complications, and any organisation is only as good as its people, so they have to look after their people.

I help develop leaders, teams, managers, and individuals.

You carried out three studies on teacher wellbeing, one in Belgium and two in the UK. How did these come about?

In 2010/2011, I was invited by an educational psychologist to speak with the director of a school in Belgium to see how they can improve staff morale. It was an international school, where staff was under significant stress and the students were under stress with it.

Through workshops and one-on-one coaching, we aligned what the teachers were doing with the strategy or the direction of the school. As staff wellbeing improved so did student performance.

I published the report and a few years later, the board of governors in a Welsh school invited me to visit, because they were going through some troubling times that threatened the future of their school. Within one year, we turned the fortunes of that school. That was back in 2016.

In 2018, I worked with another school in Wales.

Following a formal inspection, it was announced that this particular school had to make ‘significant improvements’, or face serious consequences – over the past 14 years, I have found myself supporting struggling schools that are often at the edge of being shut down.

Teachers find themselves working within a very punitive system. Consequently, teachers have a tough time because they no longer get to do the teaching that they enjoy. Instead, they have to perform according to what policymakers say, with little freedom on how they teach.

I come from a background of Sri Lankan teachers; my mother, grandmother, aunt, and mother-in-law were all teachers. And thanks to a handful of teachers who took a particular interest in me, it’s a topic that’s very close to my heart.

Coming from such a background, have you seen a change in the challenges that teachers face?

When it comes to teaching, it’s not just about teaching children facts and figures. It’s more about making sure that students are comfortable and feel safe to learn. In psychological research, there is evidence to show that unless you are mentally relaxed and enjoying the experience, your capacity of learning is limited. In other words, our ability to learn is highly threat-sensitive.

It’s the same for all of us at any age; fear must be removed to enable learning. If somebody is watching you all the time and you are under strict pressure to perform, you will quickly disengage with the process. Teaching is the same.

Increasingly, teachers are now working towards performance measures that are seen as arbitrary. It prevents them from using their creativity to engage with the students. We rarely have the opportunity to measure all the wonderful things that the teachers actually do to facilitate learning; about how they make students feel welcome in the classroom; how they make a child feel better through kindness in the corridor. All these amazing things that teachers do are sadly ignored when measuring performance, but they are also important – as important possibly as the teaching itself.

How does your work address these challenges?

It is safe to say that a teacher makes a huge impact in our society and we don’t even realise it. We’re all here because at least one teacher took a special interest in us, when they didn’t have to. These are all the intangibles that a great teacher does to truly inspire a child. Teachers do a lot more than just teach numbers or letters, and in failing to recognise this, we add to their stress.

The work I do takes a personal interest in the teacher – what the teacher really likes to do, what inspires them, what made them want to teach in the first place – and helps them reconnect with their purpose. For different people, it is different. The one-on-one work, through just 3-4 meetings, helps the teacher plan and put into action what it is they want to do.

Then when they see their line manager, they already have a plan, making it easier for them to say what they would really like to do, as well as how they will do it. Normally, line managers are simply too busy to be creative, so what we are doing is giving each teacher the power, the tools, and the language to create an engaging environment for themselves, so that they are happy within it and are performing at their best.

In reality, none of this costs money; simply the re-allocation of time and attention. The older teachers often happily mentor the younger ones. But you have to free time for this. And by giving them the freedom to do what they like, they actually make more time. It’s an interesting concept – one that doesn’t often make sense to an Excel sheet warrior in the accounts department!

Before the Covid-19 pandemic was when I started with the second school, and the real proof of what we were doing was tested by this humongous thing that came in the middle and disrupted everything. In all our schools, the Covid-challenge made teachers much more creative. They were no longer sitting in the box and thinking in the box.

They initiated creative programmes online. Some were teaching outside. There were so many different ways of engaging with students to ensure that learning took place even under lockdown. Wonderful initiatives took place because we had already opened the box lid on them to be creative and be more of who they are. And with more engagement by teachers in their activities, student wellbeing was also safeguarded. It was truly magnificent to see in action!

Does teacher wellbeing have an impact on students?

When I go to any school, what I discover is that teachers are just doing what they are being told to do, like marching to order. Unfortunately marching to order does not open the box of creative learning for our children today, and the pressure to perform simply puts teachers under constant pressure.

Sadly, children too are under a lot of pressure today, although we might think they are more privileged and better off compared to our own childhoods. Rise in mental ill health amongst children is very concerning – even in Sri Lanka. Given children spend a lot of time in school, we desperately need to take care of our teachers, so that they are better equipped to help the students in their care. So much hinges on the way we support our young, and because of that, on how we support our teachers.

People might go into teaching with some fantasy idea that it is something wonderful to do, which it is! But the ones who stay on are the real hardcore teachers who genuinely want to see their students grow, and we need to help them.

The hardest part for me is to convince the Excel sheet warriors in the accounts department that these kinds of measures actually have a short- and long-term impact across so many areas for teachers, students, and society at large. We have to take a wider, long-term perspective. Ultimately, we need to decide what it is that we are trying to achieve in our modern schools today. Are we simply trying to keep youngsters out of the streets until they are eighteen? Or are we trying to create human beings, who are socially skilled, who can effectively interact with each other, who can genuinely contribute positively to society in their own unique ways?

If it’s the former, then let’s make more prisons. If we want them to engage positively in our communities, then we need to fully support our modern teachers and treat them with respect.

How can these studies help schools and teachers in Sri Lanka?

Teachers (and students) often work within a fearful culture. They are worried about doing anything out of the ordinary. During my mother’s era, her teaching community had the freedom to be creative in their teaching. I think we need to free up and give permission for our modern teachers to be more creative too.

I do believe that the type of interventions carried out in Europe will work here in Sri Lanka, but as in Europe, it has to come from the top – the leadership must be supportive of it too.

Having worked with some Sri Lankan companies, through workshops and seminars, one thing I have discovered is that most people are reluctant to come forward with ideas, preferring instead to be told what to do. When asked ‘what do you think?’ the room often falls silent. It’s not that they’re not thinking of things, but they’re too scared to say anything. We first need to set the scene in schools, so that we can grow people who are comfortable with receiving and giving their ideas within the group.

We need people to share what they think constructively, because we each have a different reality, different experiences. When working from within a model where you (as the manager) are responsible for telling your team what to do, the limiting factor soon becomes you. This is not ideal.

At the moment, women’s voices aren’t even being heard. And not just women, but other representations of the population as well. We are only hearing one voice in different tones. It’s vital that we also teach everyone in the classroom that their voice and those of their classmates are all important.

We need to be taught how to articulate our views and in a way that is clear and not offensive. That can only come where teachers in schools are also encouraging, because the school is the first public place where we can fail as many times as we need in order to learn something correctly. But if we are learning with a stick all the time, then when we come out of the school, we are already too scared to say anything in case we fail.

As a nation, as long as we are waiting to be told what to do, we are going to always be following rather than leading, in any sector.

In talking about the brain drain that is currently happening in Sri Lanka, we are too quick in forgetting about the valuable people who are still here. In any country, people will always come and go. And even if they don’t come back, does it really matter? Maybe those people had to leave, like the old trees being cut so the young ones can grow. However, what is more important is that we actively water and nourish the young ones in our schools, already bursting with so much talent, looking for a chance to grow on fertile ground.

We see more alternative or modern education schools coming up. Do you think these schools, while giving students the freedom to learn in different ways, are still ignoring teacher wellbeing?

Yes. Teacher wellbeing is still being ignored across most of the world. Teachers are being seen, as one teacher in Wales said, ‘as a resource to use or use up’. Such thinking is a great loss to all of us.

It’s about teachers feeling valued. Teachers teach for something other than money, because in most countries, there isn’t much money in teaching. Similar to professions like nursing, for instance, teachers expend a lot of emotional energy into their work, and we must never take this for granted, because without those who care for us at our most vulnerable, our communities would crumble.

What have you seen as reasons or barriers that stop teachers from taking the initiative to develop their skills?

Time. They are kept busy all the time. They literally don’t have the time to think.

When you consider a teacher’s typical day: amidst the preparation, teaching, marking, staff meetings, and other admin work, there is very little time left to take care of their own wellbeing. Every day is a really long day. I remember my own mother coming home with a big pile of books for marking each day. We’d be playing around her, but she’d keep marking late into the night. Nothing much has changed over the years when it comes to the long hours kept by teachers.

I suppose it begs the question: do we really need so many tests? Does everything have to be about a mark or a grade? Most teachers also have families, so when they go home, they haven’t got the time for their families let alone themselves. It’s universal. Teachers are just not given the time.