Most well-being initiatives in schools are still viewed as “nice-to-have,” not “must-have,” and are centered around the individual, like chair massages on a teacher work day, a wellness vendor fair, a reminder to take a walk during a meeting, or a mindfulness app. Independent schools want to support teacher and student well-being, but our efforts don’t always reach the structure and systems that impact true well-being like workload, belonging, isolation, and engagement. Improving well-being isn’t a personal fix; it requires systemic design.
This resource gives school leaders research, tools, and templates to structurally support well-being for both teachers and students. When we design and maintain systems that are mutually beneficial for adults and students, we move past surface level experiences to a culture of well-being.
A Cross-Cutting Priority, Not an Initiative on the Side
Well-being, as defined in the SAIS Teaching & Learning Framework, is the capacity to maintain physical, mental, and spiritual health; manage emotions; and cultivate resilience to support learning, growth, and positive relationships. Well-being is a cross-cutting theme that serves as an integrative force that strengthens a healthy, supportive, and thriving school community.
Well-being isn’t just the absence of burnout. It’s a state of thriving for both adults and students. Well-being also isn’t a side initiative; it’s a condition that determines the quality of teaching, learning, student achievement, relationships, and overall school culture. Our work on well-being must start with a critical analysis of our current reality and the implications for our community.
What might it look like when a teacher is navigating an unsustainable workload? Does that change the capacity they have to nurture relationships and facilitate the type of learning experiences that foster true engagement? Have we asked students directly about their own well-being?
“Well-being is transformative when it is a defining feature of the school’s culture, shaping long-term and daily decisions and empowering all stakeholders.”
When stakeholders practice self-awareness and care for themselves and others, they strengthen a healthy, supportive, and thriving school community where relationships and well-being are prioritized alongside academics. School leaders, teachers, and students all contribute to the community and have what they need, structurally and individually, to be successful. Well-being isn’t any one stakeholder group’s job. It’s a shared practice built intentionally through systems as well as individual and collective effort.
The data make the case for a systems view. Only 63% of SAIS educators currently find their workload manageable and 20.9% explicitly disagree, a sign that well-being is still leaning too heavily on individual effort rather than structural support. Looking at systems through a well-being lens means asking one simple question of any schedule, workload, or policy: would this be sustainable and healthy for most people over time? A school that asks that question of its adult systems is better positioned to make well-being a structurally embedded part of the culture that also positively impacts students.
Belonging work also benefits from systems-level integration. Seventy-two percent of inclusion & belonging practitioners say student programming is a priority at their school, a sign that many schools are already treating belonging as something to build intentionally rather than leave to chance. A separate measure of students themselves points in a similar direction: 78% say they have at least one teacher who makes them excited about their future, with all measures of student engagement rising for a second year running.
Both data point to the same underlying capacity question. Prioritizing student belonging programming and building positive relationships that students identify as impactful draw on the same resources: time, structure, and support that allow adults to show up fully for students. What capacity, in schedules, staffing, and workload, has to exist for both to be possible?
Getting Started on Your School’s Well-Being Journey
Well-being is strongest when it’s built into the systems that guide day-to-day decision-making, staffing, schedules and routines, and academic programming. Start by identifying where adult workload and student experience are connected in your school, then look for one or two structural changes that would ease pressure for one or both.
- Where does teacher workload most directly shape the experience students have in the classroom?
- Who owns student belonging and inclusion programming at your school?
- How are belonging and faculty workload conversations connected?
- What would you cut, delay, or redesign if workload sustainability were treated as a strategic priority rather than an individual coping issue?
- Where have you seen a teacher’s own well-being show up in how engaged their students are?
- How will you know if well-being efforts are changing daily conditions, not just adding another program to the calendar?
- What evidence would tell you that students are benefiting from a more sustainable adult workload?
Resources & Tools
These ready-to-use templates help school leaders analyze and build systems that nurture a culture where well-being is integrated and impactful. Begin here and modify to fit your school’s mission.
Learn More About Well-Being
SAIS Members: For more information about improving well-being at your school, check out our webinar “Building Proactive Systems for Student Well-Being”.