Alone With Everyone: Isolation, Egalitarianism, and Teacher Leadership

In their research on creating a Master’s program devoted to training teacher leaders, Taylor, et al. (2011) interviewed multiple students for their perspectives on how they had grown personally and professionally over the course of the program. One participant, when asked about the effects of co-construction on their view of teacher leadership, stated:

“[...]usually you go to class and they tell you what you’re supposed to learn and how you’re supposed to learn it. And then you do it and you’re never quite sure if that was the right way. And here it was, they trusted us to take ownership of what we were learning and use it in ways that made sense to us, which I thought was wonderful and exciting.” (Taylor, et al., 2011)

 

Aside from the professional revelation afforded to this participant, what struck me as most pertinent was that the language used here could just as easily be applied to an elementary or secondary student as it could to a Master’s level student. As educators we are often told that current best practice involves the gradual release of responsibility, inquiry-based methodologies, “genius hours” in the style of Google and other future-facing companies - all formats that are designed to help our students function in the world of tomorrow, rather than obtain a job that exists only today. Yet the unique nature of the teaching profession makes it difficult to apply that logic to our own work. We teach students to be flexible, but we rarely change our lesson plans from year to year. We foster community, but we do not seek best practices from those outside our departments or grade levels. This inherent tension between the skills we teach, and culture in which we teach them, makes the development and nurturing of teacher leaders an ever-more pressing need in our Western school systems. 

    Two of the most damaging normative states in teaching that lead to inertia in teacher leadership are egalitarianism and isolation. York-Barr (2004) refers to the longstanding culture of egalitarianism in the profession as “a significant problem with formal teacher leadership roles” by insinuating that “teachers who step up to leadership roles are stepping out of line.” This mentality, arguably fostered and encouraged by strong unions in the teaching profession, has benefits in terms of expressing solidarity across the profession but also disincentivizes advancement, particularly when the traditional path of advancement is through administration, who are seen as being on the “other side” (Wenner, 2017). Associated with egalitarianism - and yet, also in contrast to it -  is isolation. Curiously, educators move from a culture of shared learning in Bachelor’s and Master’s of Education programs, to a culture increasingly marked by isolation as they progress through their careers. 

    Multiple studies have noted how as teachers, we “often feel very isolated within our four walls [...] yes we do have rich staff meetings but rarely is there time for authentic discussion.” (Campbell, Lieberman, and Yashkina, 2017) Others have commented on the detrimental effect of this isolationist mindset on the profession, deeming “uncoordinated practice and isolated classrooms [as] relics of twentieth-century education not positioned to support the forms of organizational learning required for schools to meet the demands for improvement they face.” (Goddard, Goddard, Kim, and Miller, 2015) This sense of “frontier education” where the teacher proudly operates independently of others, particularly at the secondary level, is deeply ensconced within the profession, to its detriment. I present three anonymized case studies whose leadership structures suggest that teacher leadership is essential for effective educational change, as evidenced by the egalitarianism-collaborative professionalism and isolationism-deprivatization dialectics.

Caste Study #1

        Consider a traditional single-gender parochial school, centrally located, with decades of tradition. In this setting, the traditions of egalitarianism and isolationism remain firm and unchallenged. Daily lesson plans are written up and submitted to the department head, then enacted with no variation across sections. Students take notes from a PowerPoint, use those notes to write essays, tests, and labs, then write their final exams. Staff are held to a strict dress code, have their entrance and exit times from the building monitored by administration and other staff, and must visibly participate in all school-wide extracurricular events. This culture is disseminated top-down through the hierarchical leadership structure, and enforced by older teachers amongst newer staff members, so that they quickly became inculcated with the norms. Any attempts to bring changes even as simple as using Google Drive are met with passive-aggression rejection. Teachers work in isolation even within their departments, and there is little sharing of resources other than those that are officially designated as correct, generally coming from a textbook. At this school, teacher leadership - such as it is - exists only to reinforce and police the status quo. This reflects the observations of Taylor, et al. (2011) that traditional forms of leadership remove authority from the classroom and do not encourage innovation. However - the students seem mostly happy; class averages are generally high; there are relatively few behaviour issues; and staff have no real complaints about the environment. This could indicate the presence of the “unsanctioned work of [teacher leaders] as often covert and subversive, but not ineffective...that function outside of the administrator’s purview.” (Taylor, et al., 2011)

Caste Study #2

        In contrast, consider a suburban high school with an exceptional focus on academic and athletic excellence, and a parent base that is by and large very active in school affairs. Despite its success, the student and staff community feel overburdened with the stress of high expectations. This was effectively counterbalanced with leadership programs within the school that helped build a sense of community amongst students. These programs in student leadership, chaplaincy, mental health, and others, actively sought to break down barriers between students and staff and reduce the isolationist tendencies of both groups. These efforts reflect what Harris (2005) refers to as the “brokering” aspect of teacher leadership. Their goal was to link communities, share leadership amongst a wider network, and create new norms. Here, however, they met with considerable resistance from some staff and students, reflecting Wenner’s (2017) observation that taking on the role of a teacher leader changes the relationship with your peers. 

    To buttress against this resistance, the various aforementioned groups joined their efforts together into school-wide events that all could participate in, theoretically eliminating the perceive elitism of being a student or staff member in these groups. This intentional community building worked against the egalitarian model and formally recognized pre-existing leadership initiatives that previously operated alone, allowing these staff and students “self-concept [to] evolve from ‘content expert’ to change maker in their wider communities.” (Taylor, et al., 2011) Although effective, this process took “what was once a comfortable, primary social relationship with teaching peers” and shifted it “ to include implicit or explicit instructional, professional, or organizational expectation” amongst colleagues, which “violate[d] egalitarian professional norms” (York-Barr, 2004) and caused conflict amongst staff who could not disengage from their deeply ingrained egalitarian mindsets. However these initiatives did manage to meet most of the seven dimensions of teacher leadership: coordination and management; school work; professional development of colleagues; participating in school change initiatives; and community involvement. (Sinha and Sanuscin, 2017) 

Caste Study #3

          Finally, consider the non-traditional environment of a hospital-based school. The teacher participates in twice-weekly “rounds” meetings which were collaborative debriefing sessions with hospital staff - psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, child and youth workers, nutritionists, and others. These invaluable sessions met most of the criteria that Hargreaves and O’Connor (2018) establish for collaborative professionalism. They were embedded within the culture of the organization; they promoted challenging, but respectful dialogue; they were run by staff based on needs identified amongst the patients/students; when patient advocates were present, the voices of the patients/students were also integrated; and, arguably most importantly, the purpose of these meetings was to better understand the wider purpose of learning - to help the child build resilience and self-care techniques; to educate ourselves and themselves about their physical, mental, and social environments; and to equip them, their families, and their school communities to manage their reintegration into society. There was no sense of egalitarianism amongst staff, but neither was there a strict hierarchical model of leadership that was enforced amongst staff. The insights gained from patient/student interviews were expanded on in rounds meetings, then applied again to those interviews to help move the patient/student towards better mental health. This reflects the cycle of praxis and cycle of impact that Taylor, et al. (2011) identify: better understanding of the patient/student leads to better planning for that patient/student, which leads again to better understanding - reflecting the cycle of praxis - while the patient/student engages in the cycle of impact by engaging in actions that had net positive results in their mental health, empowering them to engage in further actions. The inclusion of collaborative professionalism is, why teacher leadership in this program was more effective than in the second case study, where it was well-meaning but disorganized, or in the first, where it was completely top-down and inauthentic. Based on the four quadrants of collaboration outlined by Hargreaves and O’Connor (2018), it can be argued that the collaboration in the first case has “high precision” but “low trust”, since all initiatives are top-down in design; this is indicative of contrived collegiality. In the second case, the initiatives show “high trust” but “low precision”, due to their disorganization; this is indicative of informal collaboration. 

Ironically, the case of  the least traditional schooling model best reflects current research and literature around teacher leadership, rather than than the quote-unquote “high achieving” schools. These experiences raise further questions around the interplay between teacher leadership development and the professional inertia inherent to the traditional conservative Western education system. The current political climate in Ontario adds another layer of uncertainty as to the next steps for teacher leadership. Regardless, if there is to be progressive, meaningful change in Ontario’s education, then teacher leadership, and its core tenets of deprivatization and professional collaboration, is essential for the effective enactment of that change.

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WORKS CITED

Campbell, C., Lieberman, A. & Yashkina, A. with Alexander, S. & Rodway, J. (2018).

Teacher Learning and Leadership Program: Research Report 2017-18.

Toronto, ON: Ontario Teachers’ Federation.

Goddard, R., Goddard, Y, Sook Kim, E. & Miller, R. (2015). A theoretical and empirical analysis of the roles of instructional leadership, teacher collaboration, and collective efficacy beliefs in support of student learning. American Journal of Education, 121: 501-530.

Hargreaves, A. & O’Connor, M., (2018). Collaborative Professionalism: When Teaching Together Means Learning for All. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Harris, A. (2005). Teacher leadership: More than just a feel good factor? Leadership and Policy in Schools, 4 (3): 201-219.

Lieberman, A., Campbell, C. & Yashkina, A. (2017). Teacher Learning and Leadership: Of, By and For Teachers. London & New York: Routledge: Chapter 5: Teachers’ Knowledge Exchange and Sharing of Practices Through the TLLP (pp. 85-120).

Sinha, S. & Hanuscin, D. (2017). Development of teacher leadership identity: A multiple case study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 63: 356-371.

Taylor, M., Goeke, J., Klein, E., Onore, C. & Geist, K. (2011). Changing leadership: Teachers lead the way for schools that learn. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27: 920-929.

Wenner, J.A. & Campbell, T. (2017). The theoretical and empirical basis of teacher leadership: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 87 (1): 134–171.

 York-Barr, J. & Duke, K. (2004). What Do We Know About Teacher Leadership? Findings From Two Decades of Scholarship. Review of Educational Research, 74 (3): 255–316.

 Teacher Responsibility in Causing and Ameliorating School-Based Stress In Students

Introduction

Why is it that North American schools are such effective incubators for anxiety, depression, and a variety of other mental health issues? Outliers aside, the basic concepts of high school education have not changed that much over the past half-century or so. Yet in 2018 we find ourselves immersed in research and reporting that highlights all the now-familiar concepts: adolescents are more prone to stress, anxiety, and depression now than ever before, and our education system seems to be one of the chief causes of these conditions. In particular, I am interested in how teachers respond to the challenge of mental health issues in students, and how those responses ameliorate or exacerbate the conditions around the academic, emotional, and social well-being of that student.

Section 23

My interest in school-based stress began when I worked with a hospital-based school, with children and adolescents hospitalized for a variety of mental health concerns. I was warned off by family members and colleagues before accepting this position. They all warned me that these kinds of programs were were all the “psychopaths” were placed - which only served to pique my interest further. My work entailed creating literacy and numeracy programming for students who were housed in both the In-Patient and Out-Patient units, helping them earn high school credits, and managing the academic portion of their reintegration into life outside the hospital. This involved many meetings with principals, guidance counsellors, student success teams, parents, superintendents, mental health nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, child and youth workers, patients’ rights advocates, police, and more.  

In my four years in the program, I worked with hundreds of students whose mental health issues ran the gamut of suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, overdosing, schizophrenia, psychosis, OCD, PTSD; their social issues included expulsion, physical and sexual abuse, incest, homelessness, criminal charges, police brutality, and in one case, being put on a terrorist watch list by the RCMP. However, despite the aforementioned list, what I always found most fascinating was the commonalities between these students - the vast majority of them found school to be extremely stressful. Their reasons varied but generally centered around heightened expectations from family, teachers, administrators, or even themselves, and their perceived inability to meet those expectations. They regularly told me how their school simply did not understand their mental health needs; for many students, the most effective part of being hospitalized was simply two or three days away from school. The other half of my job was working with the school community to reintegrate these students after whatever incident brought them into the hospital. In many cases, the school was unwilling to accept these “dangerous psychos” back even though it was their legal responsibility to do so. I found the disconnect between what the student was asking for - support and acceptance - and the school’s reaction - rejection and intolerance - to be both personally and professionally frustrating.

In-School Mental Health Support

After four years I transferred into a quote-unquote “regular” high school which also has a highly stressed student population. One colleague and myself put together a “mental health club” which sought to bring the conversation around mental health to the forefront of the school community. We conducted an online survey of approximately 200 students; some of the more interesting data points were:

•  65% of respondents said that being at school made them “rarely” or “never” happy

•  45% of respondents said their current level of stress is “high” or “very high” - and this survey was given at the beginning of a new semester

• 30% of students reported that they slept 6 or fewer hours a night, which is generally unhealthy for a developing adolescent brain

• 82% said the majority of their stress was caused by homework

• 80% said they put “high” or “very high” amounts of pressure on themselves to succeed

• 90% of respondents said that they either were unsure or had no concept of  where to access mental health supports at school

This data points to a school community and culture where high levels of stress are not only endemic, but expected and normalized. I am curious to see what research has been done in this area, to try and develop a data-driven approach that will help teachers craft different perspectives on their roles in causing and preventing negative mental health in students.

One interesting examination by Pope (2010) looked at the reaction of a high school to the death by suicide of one of its students, as a result of academic stress. “The Jared Project”, named after that student, used a multifaceted approach to reducing stress in the school. The one approach I found particularly interesting involved asking all staff to create a schedule where they input the amount of hours they expected students to give to that course, team, club, band, or other co-curricular area. Then, when students signed up for courses, they had to calculate how many hours per day they were signing up for and include eight hours of sleep. If they signed up for more than twenty-four hours of work in a day, or if their eight hours of sleep were reduced by more than one hour, they were not allowed to have that schedule (p. 7). This is contrasted with the other end of the self-care spectrum, which is self-harm, as detailed by Dimmock, Grieves, and Place (2008). Without the support of a school network, students who lapse into self-harm as a coping mechanism are “coping with a sense of being overburdened with insoluble problems” (p.42). The researchers held interviews with adolescents who were at the end of their psychiatric treatment for self-harm, specifically cutting; through these interviews, their respondents noted that the physical pain of self-harm was easier to deal with than the socio-emotional distress brought on by school (p.44) and that they would rather cut or speak to a teen they had never met than speak to an adult in a school setting (p.45). This suggests severely maladaptive coping strategies that are exacerbated by perceived intolerance or lack of understanding from adults within a school.

Teacher Mental Health

Another Australian study by Trudgen and Lawn (2011) examines how teachers deal with mental health issues in their classrooms, specifically depression and anxiety. Of note is the stress experienced by teachers themselves. According to the study, 40% of teachers feel their career has a large amount of stress, which is twice the national average of most professions; 71% say their stress has a deleterious impact on the quality of their teaching; 57% say they have a poor work-life balance (p.128). This study tried to find a common threshold at which teachers began to intervene in their students’ mental health, usually by making a recommendation to someone else in the school that the child receive some kind of psychiatric treatment. Trudgen and Lawn found that the majority of teachers they interviewed, regardless of years of experience, were able to easily identify behavioural signs in students that would suggest some form of mental health-related distress - however, these same teachers could not act on those signs in the moment because the rest of the class was simply too busy (p.132). Another result that I found particularly interesting was that the teachers in this study believed that teens interact differently in their social spheres now than they did ten or fifteen years ago (p.133). One possible effect of this is that the instincts or “gut feelings” that a veteran educator has honed over their career vis-a-vis rationale for student behaviour may no longer be applicable, leaving educators without a framework with which to confidently make decisions. The pervasiveness of an online life - i.e. social media - realistically leaves educators dealing with a whole other level of reality that their students occupy, which the educator may know nothing about, and where their instincts are compromised with the changing of the medium. One can understand why, later in the study, the teachers say they feel an “overwhelming sense of powerlessness” to help their students (p.134).

Trugden and Lawn conclude with an observation that I feel has become commonplace with many educators - that teachers need more training in establishing their “mental health literacy” (p.138). Yet the specifics of this training and establishing the parameters of “mental health literacy” for educators remains elusive. In my practice I have sought to include “mental health advocate” as part of my role, for both staff and students. Part of this has involved training for staff around mental health vocabulary, stigma, and understanding its relevance to their own lives and the ecosystem of the classroom; a student who is experiencing stress is more likely to cause stress for an educator, which can create something of a feedback loop of stress and anxiety between teacher and pupil. I have facilitated several workshops for staff around mental health and the ministry of care, by which I mean ministry in the ecclesiastical sense, not the governmental sense. We also brought in several guest speakers into our community for staff and students. These included Canadian Olympian athlete Sarah Wells, who speaks about resilience and endurance, and Gillian White, a Ph.D. candidate at the Human Physiology Lab at UofT who specializes in the physiological effects of stress on the human brain. Our group also organizes visits to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) for staff and students to help them understand the environment a student is placed in when they are admitted to hospital for psychiatric concerns. Our hope was that these shared conversations would bridge the gap between teacher and student, adult and child, and allow both parties to understand how the other experiences stress. Once that groundwork is laid and a shared vocabulary can be used, we further hoped that we can address how staff can be complicit, explicitly or not, in the engendering of conditions ripe for poor mental health in students. This will be a difficult conversation to have as it directly addresses an educator’s pedagogy, which, in some cases, may have been established for decades. The goal of is to help staff and students understand the connection they have to one another, and how improving that connection will improve the mental health and performance of our community.

                                      

University of Ottawa B.Ed - Comprehensive School Health Cohort

My experience in my B.Ed program, at the University of Ottawa, involved mental health in my own life but not in a curricular sense. My own mental health suffered during that time; I struggled with loneliness, since I knew no one in the Ottawa area and spoke virtually no French; my grandfather and cousin both died that year; and I was acclaimed as President of the Student Federation but inherited an organization mired in debt and poor management. Yet in my classes there was no mention of mental health - nothing about teacher burnout, student anxiety, or accommodations based on mental health. Curious to see how that program had evolved since I left it ten years ago, I perused their website to see if any mental health programming had been integrated into their offerings. 

Thankfully, the University of Ottawa now offers a mental health cohort in their B.Ed program. This cohort, titled Comprehensive School Health, is offered at the both the B.Ed and M.Ed levels. Its programming is based on a Ministry of Education resource titled Foundations for a Healthy School (2016), which is itself a companion to the K-12 School Effectiveness Framework document. The cohort offers an Educational Research Unit, a list of peer-reviewed mental health resources for educators, published papers by cohort members, inclusion conferences, alternative assessment databases, and more. Examining the Foundations for a Healthy School document, upon which this cohort is based, reveals only three pages related to mental health out of thirty-seven. The document suggests accessing the Ministry’s Supporting Minds (2013) document for more intensive support around mental health strategies in the classroom. Yet in the five years since the publication of Supporting Minds, I have found that it is only familiar to teachers who make mental health a priority. My hospital school mentor was one of the consultants on Supporting Minds so I was fortunate to learn of it early on; I regularly direct teachers and students to it, and have been doing so for years, but still find that a good deal of adults in my workplace - administrators, guidance, resource workers, and teachers - remain unaware of it. 

This brings up another inherent tension in schools, being that of the new teacher and the established teacher. New teachers, coming from B.Ed programs with mental health-focused cohorts such as U of O’s Comprehensive School Health cohort, can graduate with pedagogy and a view of the profession that has mental health as its foundation, supported by government documents. These teachers ostensibly will approach mental health as their responsibility, equally as important as literacy and numeracy. Teachers who did not have this focus in their pre-service program could potentially be subdivided into two categories: those for whom mental health is not an issue connected to education; and those for whom it is. The former group could present as resistant to accepting their role in promoting positive mental health in the school community; the latter could be more active in promoting positive mental health, but may or may not have the resources, skills, or vocabulary to do so, depending on what resources and training they are able to access. This hypothetical latter group may also take a “scattershot” approach to integrated mental health, since they will have gleaned their philosophy from a variety of other sources as opposed to having it delivered in a standardized format through a post-secondary cohort. This approach could potentially make creating a school-wide shared vocabulary around mental health a more complicated task, since the concept of “mental health” can mean myriad things to different people. However, having a variety of mentalities and approaches could also be beneficial as it provides flexibility, diversity, and adaptability to approach a panoply of potential mental health scenarios.

                                    

Ego Formation and Teacher Identity

Examining the mental health connections in pre-service programs led me to consider teacher ego formation and how it relates to my subject. Many times I have been told that once a teacher is placed within a staff environment, it takes an average of three years for them to acclimatize that that environment and cast off whatever their previous concepts of education were. Thus, to create a climate where staff acknowledge and work through their role in student mental health, it is vital that the majority of that staff have enough similarities in their self-concepts as educators that they can bridge the gap between other differences that may impede progress in this area. Clarke, et al. (2018), draw on Lacan to discuss the formation of teacher identity as a dialectic between the ideal ego, or hypothetical perfect self, and the ego ideal, or practical required self (p. 116). This “lack of fit” between the two Lacanian concepts results in cognitive dissonance, which is exacerbated by “conflict arising from the space between the psyche and the social (...) becoming a teacher requires openness to knowledge of the self and to knowledge originating in the other.” (p. 116) It could be argued that for educators, students are often this “other” - a vast unknown, safely homogenized into broad stereotypes that fit our preconceived notions. The authors also connect this conflict between ego ideal and ideal ego to the use of an inside out model of ego formation as opposed to an outside in model. They postulate than an outside in model uses extrinsic factors to shape a teacher’s identity, namely: curricular documents; ministerial publications, “best practices” courses, and universal standards. The inside out model, conversely, begins with the identity of the teacher at the core and creates the teaching model built around that unique identity (p. 117). Rather than positioning one or the other of these modes of ego formation as ideal, Clarke, et al., reflect the Lacanian postmodern approach by positioning the genesis of teacher ego as an ongoing process that exists in flux between these two poles; here, the teacher-as-subject is eximate, or existing neither inside nor outside, but in both simultaneously (p. 119). 

The eximate model works well in helping me understand how teachers process new information and responsibilities, such as that of mental health advocacy. If mental health is not personally important to you - if it is not part of your inside out model - and it is not theoretically or professionally relevant to you - if it is also not part of your outside in model - then you could struggle to integrate it into both your ego ideal and ideal ego. The relatively recent emphasis on mental health in education could clash with what many educators have “learned”, “known”, and “felt” their entire careers. This new emphasis could cause these teachers to question both their ego ideal and ideal ego as teachers, particularly if mental health in schools fits into neither the inside out or outside in models of ego formation. Thus, one potential solution for them to avoid this cognitive dissonance is to avoid the concept of mental health in education all together. This allows them to still feel like competent, caring teachers, in the same way that they have expressed this for years prior to the emphasis on mental health in education, and prevents them from feeling as though they are unprofessional. Once the mentality of avoidance has taken hold writ large amongst a staff, any new staff coming in will struggle to implement their own ideation around mental health, since they too will experience this same eximatic conflict and potentially choose to go with the path of least resistance to maintain their ego ideal and ideal ego. If the phrases “I am a good teacher” and “I am a teacher who cares about mental health” do not overlap for an educator, then it is easiest to eliminate the latter in favour of maintaining one’s self-perception of the former. Perhaps this is why, in part, some teachers find it difficult to integrate concepts of mental health into their pedagogy - particularly if they cannot recognize that they themselves can be the source of poor mental health in their students. 

REFERENCE LIST

Andrews, J. and Feurer, D. (2009). School-Related Stress and Depression in Adolescents With and Without Learning Disabilities: An Exploratory Study. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, v. 55, n. 1, pp. 92-108.

Clarke, M., Michell, M., and Neville, J. (2017). Dialectics of development: teacher identity formation in the interplay of ideal ego and ego ideal. Teaching Education, v. 28, n. 2, pp. 115-130.

Dimmock, M., Grieves, S. and Place, M. (2008). Young people who cut themselves - a growing challenge for educational settings. British Journal of Special Education, v. 5, n. 1, pp. 42 - 28.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2014) Foundations for a healthy school. Ottawa, ON: Queen’s Printer for Ontario.

Pope, D. (2010). Beyond “Doing School”: From “Stressed-Out” to “Engaged in Learning”. Canadian Education Association, v. 50, n. 1, pp. 4-8

Trudgen, M. and Lawn, S. (2011) What is the Threshold of Teachers’ Recognition and Report of Concerns About Anxiety and Depression in Students?: An Exploratory Study With Teachers of Adolescents in Regional Australia. Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, v. 21, n. 2, pp. 126 - 141.

University of Ottawa, Bachelor of Education Program. Comprehensive School Health. Retrieved from http://uottawa-comprehensive-school-health.ca/. Accessed Monday, April 23rd, 2017.

Mental Health PD On The Road

Mental Health PD On The Road

Project: LILY

My main interest in education has always been how schools can better support the mental health of students. It's an issue that many educators grapple with, not to mention students, parents, and extended communities of care.

One issue my colleague and I noticed is that students entering secondary from elementary often aren't prepared for the challenges to their mental health that come about in high school. Many of our students have said some variation of "I wish I had known then what to expect now". Which raised the question - why couldn't they?

Our school mental health/anti-bullying group - Project: LILY - had done a lot of great work in our community around mental health advocacy. The next step happened when a local elementary school reached out to us for a fascinating opportunity.

LILY On the Road

My colleague and I took a group of keen group members and developed an action plan to present to a group of elementary school students from Grades 6 - 8. Our presentation was twofold:

• A simplified Slidedeck with easy-to-understand mental health tips (found here!)
• A student-lead (but staff moderated!) question and answer period

The response was fantastic. Many students asked excellent questions; a few stayed behind for longer conversations with our group of youth, all monitored by the staff. Both the presenters and the audience left with a new sense of confidence in their understanding of mental health in education.

Our success led my colleague and I to try and make these sessions a regular event, and embed them in our school goals as part of our School Learning Improvement Plan (SLIP). We shared copies of our Slidedeck with the elementary teachers in attendance, and invited our superintendent to see other Project: LILY presentations at our home school.

Bringing It Home

When we returned to our home school, my colleague and I had high hopes that we could begin implementing new mental health strategies within our own community. We had ideas for mental health newsletters, a wellness room, guest speakers, a school-wide mental health survey, and big plans for Bell Let's Talk.

However...it didn't quite work out that way. We did achieve some of our goals, but still didn't have the level of buy-in from staff that we hoped for, even though our administration was in full support. This could be a result of administrative acknowledgement framing us as being allied with them, as opposed to allied with staff, creating friction (Wenner, DATE). 

Top 5 Leadership Lessons Learned

1) Give Them Room To Fail

There were several reasons why this experiment could have ended badly: few of our students were confident public speakers; my colleague and I had never done this before; we had no idea how a group of elementary-aged students would react to our presentation. However, regardless of the outcome of the presentation, our students (and ourselves!) still achieved 2 out of the 3 concepts of teacher leadership that Sinha and Hanuscin (DATE) identify: leadership practice, and leadership identity. Our students began to see themselves as mental health leaders in their wider community, as did my colleague and I. 

2) Collaborative Professionalism Works!

Although I didn't realize it at the time, the collaboration between my colleague and I on this project met some of the conditions of collaborative professionalism (Hargreaves and O'Connor). The results of the project reflect this: PD that was requested and delivered by staff, not admin; collaborating with students, not for them; and transitioning from comfortable conversations to challenging but respectful dialogue - namely, what schools are and are not doing to support student mental health. The collaborative professionalism model worked wonders here, and we didn't even know we were using it!

3) You Can't Win 'Em All

Despite all our efforts, there were still some colleagues at our home school who kept the same opinions about mental health - namely, that students were making a big deal out of nothing. Although this was frustrating, my colleague and I knew that we would continue to make our case. This was a good example of moving from leadership as "practice", or activities, to leadership as identity. (Sinha and Hanuscin) By expanding the scope of our practice, we began to see ourselves as leaders in mental health.

4) Get Outside Your Box

Getting Project: LILY outside our school had a noticeable effect on the program. Our students became much more interested in what they could do, and what types of audiences they could reach. We "got outside our box" in the following ways:

• Booking mental health speakers designed for parents, at our parent council meetings
• Designing PD and resources for our colleagues (like this Symbaloo page!)
• Better managing Project: LILY by creating a "core team" of dedicated students
• Running online events to foster student voice and change the culture within our home school

These encompass some of the "seven dimensions of teacher leadership" covered by Sinha and Hanuscin (DATE). My colleague and I were better able to self-identify as teacher leaders in mental health by expanding the scope of our practice and embracing challenges outside our normal locus of action.

5) Work With, Not Against

Our success on the road didn't necessarily translate to success in our home school, and we didn't always feel like leaders. Harris identifies several stumbling blocks in teacher leadership: it will succeed only if the source is trusted; it can't be implemented in a top-down fashion; and the naturally "egalitarian ethic" of the teaching profession means that colleagues may acknowledge teacher leadership, but may not defer to it. (DATE) Simply saying "this is what we want you all to do" is a surefire way to get ignored! Part of our conversation needs to be around including people, addressing their own needs, and - I think most importantly - validating their current practices. Hopefully this will bring about change in the right direction, and leave a positive impact on the mental health of our entire school community. 

Share Your Thoughts!

What do you think about the state of mental health education in our schools? Do you have any great PD ideas for staff and students? I look forward to your comments!