Adult Well-Being
Learning Playlists > Adult Well-Being in Schools
Research indicates that educator well-being increases teacher retention and is strongly associated with positive environments that promote students’ academic and non-academic outcomes. This curated learning playlist offers a collection of evidence-based research, practical frameworks, and other resources designed to understand and support adult well-being in school communities. These resources are intended to help educators and leaders cultivate a trauma-responsive, inclusive, and supportive environment where all students and staff can thrive.
- Organizational Well-Being Inventory for Schools (OWBI-S) Assessment
- 60 mins
Staff well-being is not one thing, and this assessment framework from the National Center for School Mental Health makes that apparent. Across eight domains, from work climate and autonomy to purpose, equity, and professional quality of life, the OWBI-S gives school teams a shared language and concrete indicators for examining the conditions that allow people to do their best work and stay.
- The Importance of Teaching & Learning Conditions: Influences on Teacher Retention & School Performance (article)
- 25 mins
Use this article as a research foundation for understanding the systemic factors that shape teacher experience, and bring it into conversation with what you already know about your own school or district. Where teachers work shapes whether they stay and how well they teach. Drawing on survey data, focus groups, and school site visits, this research brief from Learning Policy Institute makes the case that working conditions, particularly principal leadership, peer collaboration, and community support, are among the strongest predictors of both teacher retention and student achievement growth. A note for Illinois educators: this data comes from North Carolina, but the conditions described here mirror what educators across Illinois name when asked what makes them want to stay.
- 45 mins
This CDC-funded toolkit offers district and school teams practical, low-cost strategies for building wellness programs that address the whole staff, from emotional well-being and stress to nutrition, physical activity, and financial health, with an explicit connection to school climate and student outcomes.
- 10 mins
This presentation is a companion to the School Employee Wellness Toolkit and is designed for school and district teams who want a ready-made tool for building leadership buy-in. It walks decision-makers through the return on investment for employee wellness programs, workforce and burnout data, and a customizable call to action that teams can tailor to their own district context.
- 20 mins
This practitioner-focused guide make the case for anchoring adult well-being, offering school leaders concrete strategies for moving beyond one-time surveys and pizza parties toward the kind of ongoing, data-informed care that actually shifts culture.
- Approaches for Teacher Well-Being (article)
- 15 mins
This white paper from the Education Innovation and Research Program (EIR) underscores the importance of supporting educator well-being in the post-COVID pandemic school environment. In addition to highlighting ongoing impacts of the pandemic on student and adult wellness, the resource offers several organizational models of adult well-being support that school communities are using across the country to mitigate those negative impacts
- Teachers are Anxious & Overwhelmed: They Need SEL More Than Ever (article)
- 7 mins
Although this article was published at the height of the pandemic, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence grounds its case in a 2017 survey in which teachers, well before COVID, already named overwhelm, frustration and stress as their most frequent daily emotions. What the research showed then, and continues to show now, is that adult SEL skills protect against burnout and that school leaders’ own emotional intelligence directly shapes the emotional climate in which teachers work every day.
- How to Promote Collective K-12 Staff Well-Being (article)
- 7 mins
This practitioner-focused brief from Hanover Research helps school leaders learn to recognize burnout before it takes hold, across physical, emotional, and social dimensions. It makes the case for moving beyond individual wellness perks toward a multi-tiered, collectively oriented culture of support, one where destigmatizing mental health and building peer connections are as intentional as any academic initiative.