HeartSpheres

Education

Inspirational Teaching

Developing resilience and improving teaching skills through self-management

Teaching is one of the most stressful jobs possible. In a survey assessing the stress levels of various jobs by the Health and Safety Executive; teaching came out top.

A report, The Scale of Occupational Stress: further analysis of the impact of demographic factors and type of job, published in 2000, found that 41.5% of teachers reported themselves 'highly stressed’ and 58.5% came into a 'low stress’ category.

Research by the main teachers' union, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) confirms this picture. A survey in 1999 found 36% of teachers felt the effects of stress all or most of the time.

Typical Stresses for teachers are:

• Relationship issues
• Workload, e.g. long working hours, unnecessary  bureaucracy, staff shortage (providing cover for teacher shortages and absences), large class sizes and the pressure of school inspections
• Funding problems
• Conflicts with colleagues and managers
• Problem children (behavioural problems, disruptive pupils)
• Unreasonable interference from parents within schools
• Relationship, marital and family problems
• Criticism by politicians and media
• Lack of feeling appreciated

There are a number of emotional short and long term consequences of stress, including loss of confidence, performance anxiety, low mood or depression, anger, low self-esteem, loss of enthusiasm and motivation and loss of purpose and direction. These impact on both individual teachers and schools themselves. 

We offer workshops for heads, teachers, and administration staff that introduces a mental, emotional and physiological training program to mange emotional response, promote performance and health and deepen interpersonal and educational skills.

This approach is based on scientific research in the field of stress physiology of the nervous system and the heart and on positive psychology.

The long-term benefits from applying these techniques in your work and at home include increased resilience, stress reduction, burnout prevention, performance enhancement (positive influence on children), improved health and improvement of relationships (work, pupils, students, parents, family etc.)

Benefits for schools include reduced early retirement, reduced staff turnover, enhanced team building, improved working climate, which all helps to achieve educational targets. 

Most of us have learned that any claims that sound too good to be true probably are. Yet the scientific evidence for the claims made here are strong and published in mainstream medical journals:

The first key issue is heart rate variability and it can easily be brought under our control for the benefit of our work, our moods and our health.

The second key issue is managing emotional response (self-management) to develop resilience, improve performance and sustain health.

The techniques are highly effective in helping to achieve both heart rate variability improvement and emotional response management, which in turn leads to a beneficial effect on health and performance. The techniques are also easy to learn and to practice in a busy and challenging environment. 

In half-day, one-day or two-day seminars, we can teach these techniques to you and your colleagues as we have for many others at SAID Oxford Business School, the College for Leadership in Schools and Children Services, for colleges of teachers and elsewhere.

For more information or to book a workshop, please contact us:
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7617 7435  Email: admin@heartspheres.com