Conference Agenda

Recent research by Shirley and Hargreaves (2021, 2022, 2024) proposes that after decades of intense focus on students’ test scores, education has entered upon a new Age of Engagement, Well-being and Identity. This symposium explores teachers’ well-being in Singapore, well-being in Germany, and identity in Canada. What are some of the ways in which systems are developing innovative approaches to meet the challenges of improving engagement, promoting well-being, and developing student identities? Scholars (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2012) have observed that educational change often is stymied by countries’ internal policies, but that improvement can nonetheless be stimulated through transnational exchanges. This leads us to ask: What can be learned across nations as they create new ways to address student engagement, well-being, and identity? The first paper describes how teacher well-being may be enhanced by developing professional identity, competence and commitment in Singapore. The second paper presents challenges to well-being and school improvement in Germany. The third paper describes how educators in the Canadian province of Ontario are promoting student identities to increase a sense of inclusion and well-being. This session presents new evidence on the ways that well-being is being addressed in education today.

Policy Focus: Several studies have found strong correlations between high levels of teacher well-being and how well they teach (e.g., AITSL, 2022; Turner et al., 2021; World Economic Forum, 2022). Various studies have also found that teachers are responsible for providing safe and encouraging environments and promoting holistic learning for students (Doll et al., 2014; Lee & Cheung, 2017). Teachers need to have their professional aspirations realised in order to uphold a high quality of teaching and learning.

Focus of Inquiry: This paper explores factors that help enhance teachers’ well-being (TWB) by developing their professional identity, competence and commitment. While most literature documents good practices viewing teachers at different career stages as a homongenous group, this paper takes a career-long approach and posits that teachers at different career stages have different professional development needs.

Theoretical framework: The project’s conceptual framework was partly informed by findings from earlier projects and Dewey’s (1938) acknowledgment of the centrality of experience (i.e., organisational, professional and personal aspects) and its contribution to teacher identity and professional competence. Through experience, competence is built and validated. One outcome of ongoing validation of competence is the consolidation of professional identity which is supported by teachers’ personal attributes. The combination of identity and competence form the basis for ongoing teacher commitment. Well-being is an essential component of the professional and personal dimension of teacher identity, at entry into the profession and career-long.

Methods and Data Sources: The project drew its findings from the interviews of 35 teachers who were randomly selected from 16 primary/elementary schools in Singapore. The interviews were transcribed and grounded theory (Urquhart, 2013) was used as the guiding framework. Specific techniques adopted for data analysis included the constant comparative method and Glaser’s recommended open coding (identifying categories), selective coding (clustering around categories), and theoretical coding (connecting categories) techniques.

Results: Findings supported the hypothesis that teachers of different career stages (classified into six stages; adapted from Sammons et al., 2007) have different needs that contribute to their overall well-being and this may be further correlated with the development of their professional identity, competence and commitment.

Importance: If teaching as a profession essential to improving our societies, the well-being of the fraternity must be viewed as high priority. While there are general factors that may be applied, nuanced factors related to teachers’ career stages should be given due consideration. This will ensure that each and every teacher’s needs are met and that they will be professionally engaged and committed, and thus able to give of their best to their students.

Connection to the Conference Theme: Teacher well-being is often positioned at the side-lines but to ensure student well-being, it must receive primary focus. This is most evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper explores issues of engagement, well-being and identity from the teachers’ perspectives in view of their central importance in ensuring student well-being.

Policy Focus: Even though schools in Germany are now running normally after the COVID-19 pandemic, the psychosocial stress experienced by students is great and social supports are scarce. This paper describes how a major German foundation is working with researchers to identify the state of students’ well-being and advocate for new policy interventions.

Focus of Inquiry: How can the Bosch Foundation, one of the largest German foundations, work with researchers to develop a longitudinal nationwide monitor that maps the psychosocial care of children and adolescents and influence educational policy? This paper describes a pathbreaking project currently under development by the University of Leipzig, the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, and the Robert Bosch Foundation.

Theoretical Framework: This paper draws upon social network theories and concepts of data-informed leadership to describe the ways in which the researcher community in Germany is working with a major foundation to combine rigorous quantitative findings with public dissemination and policy advocacy.

Methods and Data Sources: In preparation for a forthcoming comprehensive national study, a university-based research team conducted an online survey of 324 teachers and school social workers in 2021, which was compared with a similar pre-pandemic survey on young people’s well-being. The 2021 survey consisted of Likert scales with single and multiple choices options, along with numeric and open answer formats. The Bosch Foundation is now drawing upon this survey to promote educational change that will provide new levels of support for young people’s well-being.

Results: The psychosocial stresses evidenced among children and young people in Germany has increased significantly in recent years. Teachers and school social workers report a dramatic rise in their students’ behavioral difficulties. Not all of students’ challenges can be attributed to the pandemic, though. Some of it comes from the intensified pressure for students to perform well academically in a time of economic worries as a result of inflation, fears about the war in Ukraine, and climate change.

Importance: The survey results show that German policy makers urgently need to improve psychosocial care for children and adolescents.. Youth ill-being has a negative impact on all areas of their development, yet are not receiving the focused attention and additional resources they require.

Connection to the Conference Theme: Educators and school social workers in Germany report that schools need greater support than they currently are receiving to address the well-being crisis among the country’s young people. This calls for greater public awareness and resources for schools. This paper has direct relevance to the 2024 ICSEI theme of improved professional development to enhance school effectiveness and improvement.

Policy Focus: After decades measuring students’ attainments in literacy, mathematics, and science, educational systems have shifted their attention to student well-being. Even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2017), has begun to publish league tables of student well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the study of well-being has accelerated, although scholars differ on what well-being actually is and why it matters (Zhao, 2020).

Focus of Inquiry: This paper presents new data that shows that educators in the Canadian province of Ontario increasingly are understanding that seeking to improve well-being without addressing students’ identities is incomplete. These educators are endorsing new strategies to promote identity, especially among marginalized and underserved youth. What kinds of interventions are they implementing, and what kinds of approaches might they be limited because they require a fundamental transformation of how schools and their systems are organized?

Theoretical framework: This paper draws upon the historically psychological research on identity (Erikson, 1968; Levinson, 1986) and supplements it with sociologically-informed perspectives. We describe our approach as “critical appreciative collaborative inquiry” that has been shaped by continual dialogue with school-based partners.

Methods and Data Sources: The paper draws upon over 220 interviews with educators along with classroom observations with educators in a consortium of 10 school districts in Ontario. The author developed a common interview protocol and coded the interviews through thematic analyses using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The author wrote individual cases studies of 5,000–10,000 words of each district. These individual cases were followed by cross-case analyses to identify patterns, similarities and differences across the cases.

Results: Findings revealed that educators are transforming their pedagogies, curricula, and assessments to recognize and promote their students’ identities. At the same time, educators had difficulty reconciling the new concern with identity with established routines of standardized testing and other bureaucratic impediments to an education that students find beneficial. Without addressing these phenomena, the promotion of students in the fullness of their identities will remain limited in scope.

Importance: Well-being has moved into a prominent position in educational around the world (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). For its optimal realization, however, educators and their school systems need to include acknowledgement of students’ diverse identities, especially when they have been stigmatized and excluded. It is time for a more social approach to the promotion of identities as a core part of an effective well-being agenda.

Connection to the Conference Theme: Ongoing transformations of education entail greater attention to well-being, but this new focus is incomplete without addressing students’ identities. This paper points towards a growing need for professional education to address this hitherto neglected dimension of students’ well-being.