Mental Health & Wellbeing

In this episode of The Learning Curve, host Dr. Shannon Babbie is joined by Stephanie O’Reilly, program director for the MEd in Health and Wellbeing at the University of Aberdeen. O’Reilly defines wellbeing as a relational concept that "ebbs and flows daily," noting that mental health and education are deeply intertwined.

 

The discussion explores trauma-informed practice and the necessity of supportive relationships in schools. O’Reilly provides practical advice for educators, such as viewing all behaviour as communication and developing active listening skills. She further emphasizes moving beyond tokenistic self-care to provide teachers with the time, trust, and professional space they need to thrive. Finally, she highlights her work with the Centre for Teaching Excellence and Scotland’s ongoing curriculum reform cycle.

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TLC S1E4 Mental Health & Wellbeing
Dr Shannon Babbie & Stephanie O’Reilly

Shannon Welcome back to the Learning curve, friends. I'm your host, Dr Shannon Babbie. This is a University of Aberdeen podcast and we're continuing our journey into the future of education. Last week we explored from theory to practice with Doctor Archie Graham.
Today, we're shifting our focus to a topic that is equally, if not more crucial, Well-being and Mental Health. Joining me today is a leading figure in the field here, Stephanie O'Reilly. She'll be sharing her knowledge on mental health counselling and giving us some practical tips for both teachers and students. Thanks for being here.
Stephanie Thanks very much for having me, Shannon. It's brilliant to be here.
Shannon Please explain to the listeners, Steph, who you are and what you do here at the university.
Stephanie So, my name is Stephanie O'Reilly, and for the last 16 years I've been working in education. So, I started off first and foremost as a social studies teacher, working in schools and as a history, modern studies and politics teacher. And I did that for ten years and I absolutely loved it. I loved being a social studies teacher in schools in Scotland. And then round about the time of lockdown, I joined the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen.
I've been working as a social studies tutor for the IT program, which involves working with student teachers who want to be history, modern studies and geography teachers. And most recently, I have joined the university's postgraduate taught team. So I am the program director for our brand new course called the Masters of Education in Health and Wellbeing.
Shannon Outstanding. Could you to begin, define what we mean by wellbeing in an educational context? It's a term we hear a lot, but I think its meaning can be a bit broad.
Stephanie Absolutely. I was really delighted to hear that you'd start off with this question today. And I did a lot of thinking about what well-being is. And I first thought, well-being is really easy to define. Everyone knows what well-being is, but actually well-being is a really difficult concept to define. For me, it's about being well, but it's so much more than that. When we talk about well-being, we often think about our mental health and our physical health, and we quite often treat those two things as completely separate. But I think they're actually really deeply intertwined. And well-being, for me, has got a temporal dimension to it as well. So, it's really important to think about the fact that our health and well-being changes over time. It's not a static thing.
So I really like the Scottish Government's definition of mental health, which talks about the fact that mental health ebbs and flows daily, and I think we can all relate to that. You know, we've all had those mornings where you wake up in the morning and you feel on top of the world and everything is absolutely brilliant, and then by lunchtime it's all come crashing down. So well-being is all about how we feel in the moment. It's all about how we relate to other people.
I think it's really, really deeply relational when we think about well-being. It's impacted by our relationships. It's impacted with people we work with. It's deeply impacted by different stresses that we have in our lives. It's impacted their family life. And I think it's really important to think about wellbeing and mental health in terms of education as well. So quite often we talk about wellbeing in a medical sense. So for example, we talk about mental health and wellbeing being the absence of having a mental health issue. But actually it's so much more than that.
I think in education, health and wellbeing and education go hand in hand, and they're really deeply related to who you are as a person. So your health and wellbeing is all to do with your likes or dislikes, your quirks, your life satisfaction, your self-esteem and your sense of self-worth and self-worth is really, really important when it comes to education. So wellbeing is absolutely essential for learning.
And Michael Fullan talks about that in his work. And the idea that, you know, we need to have the right drivers for education. And one of those things is to recognize that health and well-being and education should go hand in hand. They shouldn't be separate. And sometimes they are competing priorities within education. You know, we're focusing so much on attainment, but we don't really think about the wellbeing or the wider purpose of education.
So I think we can all think about a time when we were at school or in our educational journey, where a teacher made a massive impact to our mental health and wellbeing, either positively or negatively. And so therefore, I think health and wellbeing, in an educational context, is incredibly important. And health and wellbeing really deeply impacts children's ability to, to get on with and to get on with school.
Shannon Fascinating. Thank you. Steph, your work and your practice delve into some really important areas. Two part question there. Could you tell us about some of the key aspects, especially regarding the mental health and wellbeing of students and teachers, but also what are some of the biggest challenges that they're facing today?
Stephanie So some of the key aspects of my work at the moment is involving work around how we can support teachers in schools to talk about health and wellbeing, to ensure their own health and wellbeing, and to support the health and wellbeing of students, as well.
So, one of my key roles is that I'm the program director of the master's course in Health and Wellbeing Education at the University of Aberdeen. And it is a really brand new course that has been a real passion project of mine. We previously had a course at the University of Aberdeen called a Master's in Pastoral Care and People's Support, and it was a really popular course, but we wanted to take the really excellent practice there. And that was started by Terry Ashton in the School of Education, and build on that and modernize it, to think about some of the contemporary health issues in schools.
So one of the things we look at is trauma informed practice and the idea that, you know, teachers in Scotland need to have an understanding of trauma and the impact that this has on children and young people and the impact that this has on learning. So, part of our new course is to think about the trauma informed pedagogies, practices and policies that schools can adopt to try and help children and young people.
Shannon It's very important.
Stephanie And another thing that we really think about is supportive relationships in schools. So I think it's really deeply fascinating that when you look at the standards for teachers in Scotland, the word behaviour is not mentioned in the standards, but the word relationships is mentioned fifteen times in the standards.
And so the Scottish Government's got this really strong focus on supportive relationships and how teachers should build supportive relationships with students. But there's very little advice out there on how to do that. It's almost assumed that teachers will be able to just do relationships in the classroom. That will happen sort of organically and naturally, but I think it's really important to support teachers to think about how can we improve their skills and their knowledge around how to build relationships as well.
And in terms of the challenges that teachers are facing in the classroom at the moment, there are a number of challenges in terms of mental health and wellbeing. So the first one is actually thinking about the friends health and wellbeing within the Scottish curriculum. So health and wellbeing in Scotland is the responsibility of all. And I think most teachers feel really passionate about the fact that health and wellbeing really should be something that all teachers are concerned with.
And teaching is really child centric as it should be. You know, so many people come into teaching because they want to make a phenomenal difference to the lives of children and young people. And our education system definitely should be child-centric in nature, but part of the problem with that is that you kind of overlook the role that teachers play in the health and wellbeing in schools. So instead of getting it right for every child, which is incredibly important, it's really important to think about how we get it right for everyone in our learning community.
And so teaching is it's deeply transactional. It's an art, you know? And I think one of the most important things that I read recently was Natalie Davey's work on Pedagogies of Care. You actually recommended the book Shannon, and it was a fantastic read. It talked about the fact that teaching is deeply transactional, and teachers need to experience both joy and care in classroom themselves. And I think that's something that's often overlooked. And teaching sometimes just reduced to a joy, reduced to a job rather than a joy. And, you know, we need to rethink about how teachers can be supported to make things better for children and people in classrooms.
Shannon Many of our podcast listeners are looking for tangible, actionable advice. So based on your research, what are some practical tips that a teacher can use in their classroom to support student mental health? And what about the students themselves? So that's a really interesting question and a really difficult question, because I think there are so many different things that we can recommend that can be helpful advice for teachers.
Shannon Fascinating. Thank you. Many of our podcast listeners are looking for tangible, actionable advice based on your research. What are some practical tips that a teacher can use in their classroom to support student mental health? And what about for the students themselves?
Stephanie So I think there's quite a few pieces of advice I would give in terms of supporting mental health in schools. The first one is probably to be curious, and I think this was something that I read when I was teaching myself in the classroom, and that all behaviour is communication. So that Boxall Principle of Nurture, if you like, all behaviour is, communication. And I think it really fundamentally changed my practice in terms of how I approached learning and teaching, working with young people. It's actually works for all aspects of life as well. I think it helps with you being a wife, being a mother, being a parent, but just thinking about why is a child behaving the way that they're behaving.
So instead of just seeing the child as misbehaving, think about some of the reasons why that child is misbehaving. And I think when you start to be curious about behaviour, it really helps you to build those Close relationships with children and young people. And this involves things like listening and building those listening skills to be a really good, active listener and to think about some of the embedded counselling skills as well that teachers can develop that really help to support them, to have positive interactions in the classroom.
So at the University of Aberdeen School of Education. We're really lucky that the School of Education also runs alongside the School of Mental Health and Counselling., So I work with some absolutely fantastic colleagues here who really help to improve our courses in education by thinking about those links to counselling and how we can build those fantastic relationships with children and young people. So being curious about behaviours is definitely one thing that we can do to help us to be better teachers.
Another thing that will probably make people want to switch the podcast off at this point is really when we use the word self-care, because quite often we talk about teachers just need to look after themselves. Teachers just need self-care. And sometimes that's packaged in a way that's really tokenistic. You know, that idea that teachers suddenly go and have a bubble bath or teachers take themselves out for a long walk or get a nice coffee, that everything will be rosy all of a sudden and better, you know?
But I think teachers really have a lot of work to do on recognizing their own emotions and looking after themselves. They're so good at giving to children and young people all the time, which is really important. But it's also recognizing that society… teachers can't fix all of society's ills. And it's okay to ask for help as well. I think that's really fundamentally important.
And last of all, I would say one thing that schools can do, particularly senior management, is to really if you manage staff, look after them. So really think about just being human and treating people the way you would want to be treated yourself as well. And senior management skills, they have really difficult jobs as well. But just giving teachers time and space to be professionals, to be human in your interactions with staff and really try and rely on each other for support. It's really important.
Shannon Steph, that's such brilliant and great advice. I'd like to know what kind of exciting project you're focusing on right now.
Stephanie So, I'm really lucky here at the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen that we have such a lively and vibrant research culture. We really do, and I'm really lucky to be part of several projects at the moment that I'm really passionate about that help me to think more about health and wellbeing. And the first one of those is that the University of Aberdeen has just joined the Centre for Teaching Excellence, and so the University of Aberdeen is going to be in charge of the pedagogies to support attainment in diverse classrooms. And that's really, really exciting work.
So we're at the very beginning of that journey, working as part of the Centre for Teaching Excellence, there's a really good opportunity there for us to share our knowledge and expertise around health and wellbeing, how to support health and wellbeing of children and young people in the classroom, but also to support the health and wellbeing of families and community and also teachers as well. So there's some really exciting work in the pipeline there. We have just very much started that, but really excited for what that holds in the future.
And the other thing that I'm really enjoying at the moment is that we're trying to build relationships and partnerships between the university sector and schools, because that's incredibly important for what we do. So at the moment, I'm part of the steering group for the curriculum improvement cycle for the health and aspect and the great work that Education Scotland is doing there. And I'm working alongside three fabulous female colleagues from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Strathclyde to look at how Education Scotland is approaching curriculum reform in Scotland. It's a really exciting time for curriculum reform in Scotland, because it's an opportunity for lots of different interested parties to come together and be part of the change.
I think often in the past, teachers have found that curricular change is very top down, that there's policy makers and a little room somewhere deciding how teaching should be. But this is a really exciting initiative, and one of the things we're really interested in is how teachers’ voices are part of that curriculum improvement cycle and thinking about teachers voices feeding into the health and wellbeing curriculum.
So it's a wonderful opportunity where it's just beautiful to see it in action. You know, you have people from the early years, people from primary and secondary. There are people from NHS, there's people from lots of different agencies coming together for the first time to really make decisions about how we can improve the health and wellbeing curriculum in Scotland. And again, it's very, very child focused. It's very much looking at social justice and inequality and thinking about how we can make Scotland the best place to grow up in.
Shannon This might be my favourite question to ask people. On a different note, what do you wish I'd asked you today? And what's the answer?
Stephanie So the pressure of that question, there are so many things that I wish you'd asked me, and I think I really want to think about my political background as a modern studies teacher. And I really want to think about the kind of health and well-being of children and teachers. And I think the question I wish you'd asked was, what do teachers need to be able to support health and wellbeing in Scotland?
And I really think that listening to teachers as experts is so important. And I really relate very closely to Biesta’s work around the angle of the teacher. His recent work talks about the fact that we can overlook the angle of the teacher, and we really overlook the role of the teacher in education. And so I think it's really, really important to think about what do teachers need to be able to support health and wellbeing in classroom?
So I think the first thing you need is time, time and space. So much of what we have to do in the classroom is very reactive. You know, you can't predict what's going to happen in the classroom. And so you have to always be adaptable and on edge and able to to deal with things as they arise. But there's, there's definitely a place for thinking proactively about how can we support children's mental health and how can we support our own mental health. So I think giving teachers time to have conversations about mental health and wellbeing is really, really important and not just framing them as how can we help and support students? How can we help and support families? How can we help and support each other as colleagues? It's really important as well. I think something else that teachers really need to be able to support health and wellbeing in schools is a little bit of support from society as well.
You know, it's a really difficult time to be a teacher, and I think teachers do the most incredible work in the world. I'm lucky enough, I think, to be married to the best teacher in the whole entire universe. But every single day, I have these kitchen table conversations about the role of teachers and what they can do to support children and young people, and how we can make society better, and how we can change education for the better. And teachers really deeply care. And they care so much about children and young people, and they suffer from a little bit of identity crisis at the moment. I think sometimes there's a lot of teacher bashing goes on.
Shannon Definitely.
Stephanie There's a lot of people thinking that teaching is just a nine to five job and just fantastic holidays. And actually, teachers do so many things. The relationships they build with children and young people. When I think about my own children's primary school teachers, they probably spend more hours a week with my children than I do sometimes, you know? And the fantastic, powerful relationships that teachers build. So thank a teacher would be one of my key things to say. If there's anything that you can do, think about the wonderful impact that teachers can have.
And I think the last thing that teachers really need to be able to support health and wellbeing in schools is a sense of trust. So trust from senior management and an opportunity for empowerment so that teachers can really run the show in their own classrooms. They're able to identify the needs that children have and they're able to support those, and they're trusted to do so.
Shannon One of my colleagues back in the US used to say, teaching is the job that makes all other jobs possible. And I think that that's really an impactful statement to think about.
Stephanie Yes. Definitely is.
Shannon Steph, thank you so much. This has been such an incredibly important conversation. Uh, thanks for sharing your very valuable expertise and your thoughts with us. Uh, and for the important work that you're doing, listeners, you've heard it here. Get practical tips for teachers and students on mental health and well-being from leading researchers and practitioners in the field here at Aberdeen. Steph, it was a pleasure.
Stephanie It's been lovely to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation.
Shannon Next week, we'll be exploring how the School of Education's research is making a direct impact on the classroom. Speaking again with Gordon Stewart, Alan Grieve and Alison Young, Beth McClure. You won’t want to miss it!. Until next time, Keep Listening!