Blogpost #2: Tools, measures & approaches

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.

Well-Being.

A term that encapsulates so many things that it needs to be broken down, layer by layer.

Prior to our GTS Teacher Only Day in the first week of this term, my understanding of well-being was as broad as many others. It revolved around the contentment and state of happiness of an individual.

Well-Being is one of our school goals. How to ensure that the school supports the well-being of its staff and students. I somewhat understood that well-being counted for many things, such as emotional well-being and feelings, physical well-being, social well-being etc. 

However, I had only just learnt that 'Occupational well-being' was something of existence too. What does that mean you ask? Occupational well-being is a term that was introduced to our staff by an outside facilitator named Tony Burkin. He usually works with management and staff on how ensuring that our teacher practice is effective and top quality. He challenges us to challenge ourselves.

One of the tools he introduced to our staff was the 'Occupational well-being' survey. This survey helped us analyse our own 'occupational well-being' in 4 main areas: Cognitive, Subjective well-being, Physical and Mental well-being and Social Well-being. Basically, we had 62 questions we had to answer by a grading system, 0 being disagree strongly, 1 = disagree, 2 = agree and 3 = agree strongly. When the staff had gone through the set of questions, we then had to add up our score. Tony would say "ok, please add your score for questions number 2, 25, 42, 1, 6 and 12. If you totalled 5 or below you are in the lower division, 6-10 is average, 11+ is high.

What this survey helped me realise was the need to balance things out in life. We can't let what happens in our personal life, affect our professional life. It's very complicated to manage this because as teachers, many of us are emotional people and part of our life, outside our profession helped shape us into who we are.

So what?

I'd love to use this survey on other teachers - rather than having my own group of 'target students', I feel like my group could be made up of staff members instead. I believe that in order for student achievement to occur, teachers are key to making this happen. If the learner is not learning from how the teacher is teaching, the teacher needs to change his/her practice to best cater to the learner and their needs.