By Suzanne Hall (she/her), retired teacher and BCTF staff, Maple Ridge
What is “thriving”?
Last June I bid goodbye to a 34-year career in education, during which my mission was “helping others learn and grow.” It guided my work with both students and colleagues regardless of my role: classroom teacher, teacher-librarian, helping teacher, or union leader. This paralleled my desire to improve myself both as an educator and as a person. Only recently did I make a powerful new connection: this combined experience of development and success is called “thriving,” and it is measured by assessing how well a person functions overall. This, I realized, was a field of study with a lot to teach teachers.
And, since I have found that nothing is so practical as a good theory, I am sharing some research regarding what enhances our ability to thrive. (1) It ties much of what we already know into a coherent, helpful framework that can help us in how we choose to see things and in how we take care of ourselves. The goal is to create a sustainable career in a demanding field while staying mentally and physically healthy. A career in education is not a sprint; it is an ultramarathon. The research on thriving is exciting because no matter where you are in your career—beginning to teach, firmly mid-career, or approaching retirement—it is relevant and helpful.
To thrive as a teacher is to live in balance between success and growth, to be accomplishing your goals while at the same time growing as a person and/or as an educator. This powerful paradigm allows you to “see” your difficulties and challenges in light of the growth they allow. It also helps you judge when the balance of challenge and success is seriously off kilter and to make appropriate adjustments, which is a powerful form of self-care.
Three components come into play with regards to a meaningful life. One is coherence, which means making sense of your experiences. Another is significance, which is the feeling that you and your life matter. The last is purpose, which is having important goals to work toward.
What enables us to thrive?
There are specific aspects to consider when crafting a life in which you thrive; the research calls them “psychosocial enablers.” The first category is “personal enablers.” These are the attitudes, cognitions, and behaviours that work together to support your ability to thrive. The second category is “contextual enablers.” These are the characteristics of an environment that supports task engagement, (2) which is essential for thriving.
Personal enablers
Knowledge and learning has two components: your professional knowledge and your understanding of yourself. To thrive, it is critical to want to learn information and skills relevant to the job; professional development gives you the autonomy to seek out those learning opportunities. Lots of information is available through your local union office and on the BCTF website. A good person to connect with is your local union’s PD chair to find out all the opportunities for professional learning and/or mentoring.
However, you don’t need to become expert in everything; your strengths as a teacher can be used to mitigate your weaknesses. Teach someone’s French if they’ll teach your art (this was my favourite trade!). Use your research skills to find science experiments that don’t overwhelm you. Ask your colleagues for resource suggestions. Draw on your love of Marvel comics to engage unenthusiastic students. Myriad possibilities exist!
It is also very helpful to take advantage of a good understanding of your personal strengths and challenges. Plan upcoming units in the evening if you are a night owl. Schedule mid-week outings with friends if you are an extrovert who runs out of energy by Wednesday. Devote time on the weekends to whatever activity brings you joy. Teaching is plenty challenging; strategies that prevent you from becoming overwhelmed and drained are fair game.
Having a proactive personality means being willing to challenge yourself. All teachers have this; to teach is at its very core a personal challenge. However, this can be a double-edged sword because taking on too much challenge can become overwhelming. Thoughtful management in this arena helps you keep that balance between development and success. To that end, a vision for your life and a mission statement can be very helpful. My go-to authors for this kind of work are Stephen Covey and Brené Brown.
Motivation is your desire to grow and succeed. It springs from your beliefs about the meaning of your life’s work and is energized by your talents and interests. Three components come into play with regards to a meaningful life. One is coherence, which means making sense of your experiences. Another is significance, which is the feeling that you and your life matter. The last is purpose, which is having important goals to work toward.
A mission statement—a sentence that encapsulates and articulates your purpose—can be a powerful tool. The process of developing a mission statement is itself a powerful exercise of introspection. It asks you to look deeply into what you value and what contributions you want to make. (3) With that insight into what you truly want to be doing with your life, many decisions become easier. Opportunities arise all the time; I found my mission statement to be a powerful lens through which to consider opportunities. Be a mentor? Yes, I like to help people; that fits. Start a side-hustle selling cookware? No, I live to eat, not to sell; I’m best staying on the customer side of things.
Religion or spirituality can be important for some people. Fundamentally, this feeling of being meaningfully connected to the universe reflects a person’s moral and civic identities. These are deeply personal matters that typically don’t come up in a professional context. Nonetheless, research shows that when they are a part of a person’s life, they can support the ability to thrive by providing a supportive network and/or a source of motivation.
A positive perspective reflects your moral purpose and philosophical beliefs; they are the lenses through which you interpret life events, both big and small. Two well-known practices can be helpful to enhance a positive outlook. One is reframing, the conscious re-examination and shifting of how to interpret an event. This is one of the reasons that the model of thriving is so powerful; it allows us to see our challenges as a necessary condition for thriving. Another useful tool is to develop a gratitude practice. A gratitude journal is perhaps the most well-known strategy, but a quick search online gives a plethora from which to choose. (4) Like visioning work, the trick is to find which of the many, many options work well for you.
The concept of resilience is well known in education. It is the strength to overcome (and possibly benefit from) your struggles. Inherent elements of resilience are being flexible and adaptable; along with the willingness to take on challenges, these are fundamental to effective teaching. An excellent tool for teachers to help nurture their own resilience is the book Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators by Elena Aguilar. It is literally full of ideas—organized to follow the flow of a school year—to help you enhance your resilience, and therefore your ability to thrive. I once was part of a book study using Aguilar’s book. It was so much fun to meet monthly with a group of teachers and use the activities from the accompanying workbook! But more importantly, I adopted practices that serve me still today. For instance, I love my mental “not now” shelf; that is where I park ideas that intrigue me but that I can’t take on … yet. Somehow, this lessens my anxiety about missing out on a good thing while keeping me from getting overwhelmed.
During those book club meetings, we were also using our social competencies to connect to others in a meaningful way. Social skills facilitate the interpersonal interactions that support learning, growth, and connection. (5) As part of the core competencies and foundational elements of social-emotional learning, teachers are used to thinking about these in terms of our students. Research assures us that we benefit from putting them to use in our own lives as well.
One of the most powerful implications of this research is that the time we take for personal development and self-care, to deepen our learning, and to connect with others is in fact highly supportive of our professional work. The choice is not “either-or” ... time spent in these pursuits helps us to be our best in the classroom.
Contextual enablers
Contextual enablers are the other category of elements to consider as you craft a sustainable life and career.
Attachment and trust are foundational to sustaining supportive relationships. These are the people who help you thrive by supporting you when you face challenges, as well as by recognizing and celebrating your successes. Interestingly, the people with whom we engage this way often change over time as we ourselves grow and change. As such, investing time and energy in established and developing relationships is not self-indulgent or frivolous; these relationships are foundational to our ability to learn and succeed, the core functions of thriving.
This final enabler—challenge environment—is the context in which your development and success play out. It has important implications for teachers. An environment that promotes thriving has an appropriate amount of challenge and difficulty without overwhelming your skills and coping capacities. When overwhelmed, growth is curtailed and you feel unsuccessful; this hinders your ability to thrive. Sometimes you can use other enablers to moderate the level of challenge you experience in a classroom. For instance, experiences and activities that increase your sense of autonomy, competence, and belonging can help.
To some extent, contextual enablers may feel outside of our control. For example, relationships with colleagues and employers that support learning, recognize successes, and create an environment where you have the autonomy and safety to take risks can have a positive impact on work environment and thriving, but these relationships don’t exist in every school and district. Our classrooms are also increasingly difficult to manage, as is our workload, which can make challenges too difficult to be helpful. As a result, teacher burnout is probably at an all-time high.
Now what?
Many teachers feel guilty when taking time for “selfish” pursuits. One of the most powerful implications of this research is that the time we take for personal development and self-care, to deepen our learning, and to connect with others is in fact highly supportive of our professional work. The choice is not “either-or”; instead, we can rest assured that time spent in these pursuits helps us to be our best in the classroom.
The ability to assess your own situation and your role in it—knowing when you have done all that you can do—can facilitate your giving yourself some grace. Teachers on the whole are terribly hard on themselves. Knowing that you have done everything feasible to create a healthy work environment allows you to place the responsibility for the elements that are beyond your control and influence squarely back where they belong. For far too long, blaming teachers has been the systemic response to system-wide challenges. It is my hope that in learning about this research, we develop a better understanding of what we need in order to thrive, become more skilled in making adjustments to support ourselves, and speak more powerfully in support of students, teachers, and public education.
1 Daniel J. Brown et al., “Human Thriving,” European Psychologist 22, no. 3 (July 1, 2017): 67-79, doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000294
2 Task engagement refers to the degree to which individuals invest their physical, cognitive, and emotional energies into a specific task that comprises part of their work or learning role: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8827296
3 Online Franklin Covey Personal Mission Statement builder: