Are the assets that support teachers’ wellbeing similar across different contexts?: Lessons from Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Lebanon

• In Event: Framing the Future of Teacher Wellbeing in Low-resource and Crisis Contexts: Definitions, Measures, and Motivations

Proposal

Low levels of teacher wellbeing (TWB) have been associated with higher rates of turnover and absenteeism (Albulescu et al., 2018; Ingersoll, 2003) while high levels predict teacher retention, increased self-efficacy, and job satisfaction (Collie et al., 2012; Zee & Koomen, 2016). TWB affects the quality of instruction, ability to form meaningful relationships with students, classroom management, and capacity to create an inclusive classroom (Greenberg et al., 2016; Jennings, 2016). There is a strong positive relationship between TWB and student social, emotional, and academic development (Colvin, 2017; Schonert-Reichl, 2017). While there is a growing body of TWB research, there is a dearth of knowledge of what TWB looks like in practice for educators in low-resource and fragile contexts in the majority world. Moreover, TWB is rarely defined and situated within its context of study, and related research seldom engages teachers in the process.

To address these issues, our research—Contextually Relevant Emotional and Social Wellbeing Tools (CREST)—is focused on working with the education ecosystem in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia to address the following research questions:
1: How do educators in the countries/districts under study define teacher wellbeing? (a) What constructs do they prioritize? (b) What differences emerge among educators from different demographic groups (e.g., sex, years of teaching, displacement status)?
2: What are the feasible steps to transform these context-specific definitions of teacher wellbeing into assessments of these constructs?
3: What are the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of these context-specific teacher wellbeing measures?

In the panel, we focus on findings for the first research question. In each country we focused on 9-12 school communities. We conducted 18-24 focus group discussions (FGDs) with primary school teachers. In these FGD’s participants were asked to think about a teacher who they think is doing well in the profession (does not have to be the teacher with the first students or best grades) and list the factors (skills/qualities/people, training, support, policies) that helps this teacher do well. We then conducted a participant ranking exercise to identify three factors from each FGD that participants ranked as the highest. Participants then defined each factor and provided examples of what these factors looked like in practice. Our initial analysis suggests that there are strong thematic similarities in the factors identified across contexts. Across the four samples in the four countries, teachers prioritized the relationships they had with their students, other teachers, and administrators in the school as being important to their wellbeing. Teachers also highlighted the importance of intrapersonal skills, like motivation for teaching, self-efficacy, and preparation, as being important to wellbeing. Overall, teachers in each of the four samples defined TWB broadly as their overall health–social, physical, emotional, financial–inside and outside the profession. We discuss the implications of these findings for co-creating TWB measures with partners from the education ecosystem in each country.

Author

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame