Putting Well-Being Strategies Into Place: New Research Findings From Ontario and Germany

• In Event: Student Well-Being and Public Good: The New Front Line of School Effectiveness and Improvement?

Abstract

International research and advocacy organizations such as the OECD (2016) and UNICEF (2013) increasingly are promoting a well-being agenda for schools and society. This has many promising aspects, particularly when it comes to addressing sources of students’ ill-being such as poverty and other forms of social disadvantage. At the same time, several criticisms (Cedarström & Spicer, 2015; Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009; McLaughlin, 2012) have been advanced of this new agenda. These argue that previous approaches to addressing well-being, under the nomenclature of “self-esteem” and “emotional intelligence,” not only showed no evidence of contributing to school effectiveness and improvement, but actually had adverse and anti-social impacts, as students and teachers became increasingly preoccupied with their emotions rather than the intellectual challenges of teaching and learning.
This paper will take these criticisms seriously by exploring the ways that well-being is being addressed in one school improvement network in Ontario and by another one in Germany. Research findings indicate that new attention to well-being is received positively by students and their educators, but that at the same time some of the critics’ concerns have validity, especially when the well-being agenda is detached from the broader academic and civic purposes of education.

Authors

• Dennis Lynn Shirley, Boston College

• Michael Schratz, Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck