The Minimalist Educator Podcast
A podcast about paring down to focus on the purpose and priorities in our roles.
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 078: The Hidden Crisis in Education with Dr. Helen Kelly
Dr. Helen Kelly shares her journey from workplace safety lawyer to international school principal, and how her personal experience with burnout led to her current work researching educator wellbeing. She offers evidence-based insights about preventing burnout and creating school cultures that support teacher and leader wellbeing.
• Understanding burnout as a continuum that everyone moves along, with engagement at one end and burnout at the other
• Emotional workload and lack of community connection are stronger contributors to burnout than quantitative workload
• Teacher wellbeing directly impacts student outcomes including academic performance, sense of belonging, and non-cognitive skills
• Recovery from burnout requires regular practice of four experiences: psychological detachment, relaxation, control, and mastery
• Post-pandemic challenges include increased student mental health issues and decreased time for staff community building
• Thoughtful school calendaring that anticipates pressure points and prioritizes connection is essential for wellbeing
• Simple interventions like shared meals during professional development days can transform school culture
Start the day with non-work thoughts. The first thing we do in the morning should not be reaching for our phones to check work emails. Delaying work thoughts through activities like stretching, having tea outside, or singing in the shower can positively impact cortisol levels and prepare us to cope better throughout the day.
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Welcome to the Minimalist Educator podcast, where the focus is on a less-is-more approach to education. Join your hosts, christine Arnold and Tammy Musiawski, authors of the Minimalist Teacher and your School Leadership. Edit a minimalist approach to rethinking your school ecosystem each week, as they explore practical ways to simplify your work, sharpen your focus and amplify what matters most so you can teach and lead with greater clarity, purpose and joy.
Speaker 2:On this week's episode, we're joined by Dr Helen Kelly, who speaks to us about all things educator well-being. Her pare-down pointer is to start the day with non-work-related thoughts. Dr Helen Kelly is committed to helping schools maximise wellbeing and improve school culture. She led international schools in Asia and Europe until she retired from her work as a principal in 2020. She has been conducting research in the field of educator wellbeing for almost a decade. Prior to becoming an educator, she spent 10 years as a lawyer in the field of workplace health and safety. From this diverse experience, helen brings a unique and valuable perspective to her work. She draws upon her knowledge of evidence-based practices, her understanding of the needs of school communities and her legal background to deliver approaches that are strategic, effective and have long-term impact on individual well-being and school culture, and have long-term impact on individual wellbeing and school culture. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Minimalist Educator podcast. Today, tammy and I are joined by Dr Helen Kelly. Welcome, helen. How are you?
Speaker 3:today. Hi, christine and Tammy, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm really really well. Thank you, thank you, excellent, fantastic. So I first came across your work, uh, through LinkedIn. Everyone was sort of sharing the work that you were doing, the research that you were doing, and I saw you had a, a book. A school leader school leaders matter and picked it up, loved every minute of it, would highly recommend it to other people. And in that book, you share not just the research and the data that you have there, but also a little bit about your personal journey as well, which is quite an interesting perspective, coming from something other than education and then getting into education and researching as well. So can you tell us a little bit about your journey to where you are now?
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, my first career was actually as a solicitor, a lawyer, in the UK, and I worked for a big company that were famous for their work with the labour movement, acting for trade union members who'd had accidents at work and suffered from industrial diseases. So I always think that that's where my interest in workplace wellbeing began. It took me a few years to connect those things you know. Well-being began. It took me a few years to connect those things you know. And then I wanted to travel and work, and I was a solicitor, my husband was an engineer and those things didn't really go together. So we both re-qualified to become teachers so that we could travel and live all over the world. So that was what I did, and I worked in international schools for about 20 years, and for 15 years of that I was a principal in Hong Kong, in Berlin, in Bangkok, and then in 2019, I became unwell.
Speaker 3:I was diagnosed with heart disease, even though I'm not a poster child for heart disease, you know, I look after myself, I'm slim, I'm fit, I'm active, I have had a plant based diet for 25 years. And then I also kind of had to acknowledge, with the support of professionals, that I'd experienced an occupational burnout and, as a result of that, I decided to give up my career at the age of 55. So kind of 10 years before I would have done anyway. 55. So kind of 10 years before I would have done anyway. In the few years coming up to that, about 2013, so about six years I'd actually been researching in the field of school leader.
Speaker 3:Wellbeing started with my ED thesis, and so, you know, it's one of those things where doctors make the worst patients. I knew all the theory, but it still happened to me and I think maybe there was an awareness of what had happened to me because of my you know, my research experience. And so I retired in June 2020, which was in the middle of the pandemic and intended to kind of grow vegetables and, you know, have a quiet life. But people kept contacting me and asking me for support because, you know, there were so many issues then that were emerging around well-being. There was an awareness building, and so this kind of second stage of my education career began as a an author and a consultant and researcher and presenter and all of that stuff, and so I've been doing that now for five years.
Speaker 4:It's such an interesting journey that you've had, coming from outside education, as you mentioned, and then coming in and seeing some of those similar types of trends, and you've been in different locations too and seen things come up. So what kind of trends come up when you're looking at potential leaders that are just unwell, maybe not even at the point of burnout yet, but what are some of those things that you saw in the different locations and different roles that you have been in?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think the research it bears out, the research, really, you know, the research of Maslach and Leiter into burnout. You know, everything that I do is very research based. I always say it's not just because I say it is, but because people who are much more clever than I am have dedicated their lives to this field. You know, and whilst workload is absolutely a factor, I think it's important to understand that it isn't just about quantitative workload, it's not just about the amount of work that we have to do. I think, on the whole, principals and teachers in international schools and in other, you know, what I found really spans all the kind of different types of schools, as well as different countries.
Speaker 3:It's really the emotional workload that is what takes people down in the end, and not having enough support with that and the isolation, you know, especially in international schools where you're away from your normal support network and so you're lonely, you don't have anyone that you can talk to. And then, side by side with that, you know, maslach and Leiter found that the second most common cause of burnout in education professionals is community. So not having that community in place. And whilst that can happen in schools in London, you know where people are living in the place where they come from and they have a support network. The school community is still important to them because you spend a lot of time there, but in international schools it's even more so because the school community is everything and so feeling that you have that support and connection, that human connection, and lacking that I think there are other factors, but I think those are the two key factors that make the impact in the end that not feeling connected and supported and the emotional overload.
Speaker 2:You've described as well the burnout as a continuum, and what I thought was really impactful about that is you don't have to keep going down the continuum, you don't have to follow it all the way to the end. You can actually take measures along the way and turn it around and so on, or move back and forth sort of thing, in that continuum. Can you tell us a?
Speaker 3:little bit more about that. Yeah well, that conceptualization isn't mine. Again, that conceptualization is from Maslach and Leiter, you know the foremost researchers in the field, and they say that everyone, every employee in the world, in every kind of job, is on this continuum somewhere and at one end is engaged. You know you're, you're not feeling exhausted, you're feeling effective and you're feeling closely connected to your work. But during the course of your career, depending upon the demands that you're feeling closely connected to your work, but during the course of your career, depending upon the demands that you're experiencing and your capacity to cope with those demands at any given time, you can start moving along that continuum towards the bad end, which is burnout. And in between there are other stages which usually, but not always, come in the order of exhaustion, which is beyond just normally being tired, and then what we call cynicism or depersonalization, where you stop feeling that connection to your work and you don't feel that you believe in it anymore and I really remember that happening to me and then starting to feel ineffective it doesn't necessarily mean you are ineffective. And then starting to feel ineffective, it doesn't necessarily mean you are ineffective, but starting to feel it. And when those three things come together the exhaustion, the cynicism, depersonalization and that feeling ineffective. Once we've got all of those three things in place, then we've reached burnout. So it's important to understand that, because we understand then, as you said, christine, that it isn't inevitable that burnout happens.
Speaker 3:If we can understand the signs and symptoms of those three aspects of burnout, we can take steps to address them and to move us back towards that engagement end.
Speaker 3:And the chances are, at some point point we'll move back again and we'll keep moving back and forth. But as long as we can kind of keep control of it and we don't let it go too far, then we'll be okay. What happens with burnout is it's like falling off a cliff. It takes possibly years to get there. Certainly, in my case it was probably a decade. But when it happens in the end it happens so fast you can't stop it and then it's beyond your control and all of the research shows it takes around three years to recover from a burnout and many, many people can never go back to experiencing the level of workplace stress that they had prior, experiencing the level of workplace stress that they had prior. So it's something that we need to take extremely seriously because the implications for career, for wealth, for capacity to earn a living, all of those kind of very serious things that are really affected.
Speaker 4:It makes me sad to know that so many people are on this continuum at the end, you know, towards the burnout end. Yes, and you know, we saw a lot of that during the pandemic, because there was just so much like chaos and people didn't know what to do collectively, right, we just didn't know what was happening and we didn't know what to do. And this might seem like an obvious question, but maybe there's some things that we haven't thought about. But when you're on this continuum near your burnout and you know the burnout side, what kind of impact does that have, or what did you see in your roles or when you were in that place that it has on your community? So not just your colleagues, but also the impact on students.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, I mean, first of all, you're absolutely right, tammy, about the chaos. You know that I've already mentioned workload and I've mentioned community, but there are four other factors that Maslach and Leiter have identified that contribute to burnout. I won't go through them all, but probably the third most important is control. So if we don't have control and autonomy over our work, then that is going to help us to move along that burnout continuum towards the bad end. And so during the pandemic we felt that we didn't have control.
Speaker 3:Interestingly, you know, I've worked with thousands and thousands of educators over the last five years in this kind of context and some people say they were actually at their happiest in the workplace during the pandemic. I mean certainly in schools in the UK, where they were going into school and they were actually the only people who were going into work and so they were feeling that sense of community and they were not experiencing the isolation that others were experiencing. So you know, there is a kind of different way of looking at that. As far as the community is concerned, you know it's interesting. I just discovered a couple of days ago a wonderful report from the IBO the International Baccalaureate that they've released in 2024, about school teacher wellbeing and they are absolutely unequivocal about the impact that this has on student outcomes. And I think that we've been pussyfooting and dancing around this for years. We've had some concrete research come out of the UK, from York University, about the impact on students of being taught by teachers who burn out. But what the IBO have done is a meta study where they've brought together all of the research from recent years and they are absolutely unequivocal about the impact on the inability of teachers to connect and be engaged with their students if they're experiencing problems with their own well-being and the impact that this has on students.
Speaker 3:So when students don't engage well with their teachers, obviously that has potential to impact their academic outcomes, but it also impacts their sense of belonging, which is something that we're talking about a lot at the moment and that impacts their well-being. We also know from this research review that they've done that. There's concrete evidence to show that it impacts on students' non-cognitive skills, you know, such as teamwork and collaboration and adaptability. We also know from York University that students who are taught by teachers who are burnt out have higher levels of blood cholesterol, so they are experiencing higher levels of stress.
Speaker 3:So, absolutely, you know, if, on the whole, teachers and school leaders don't put themselves first and often schools don't take teacher well-being seriously enough because they think it's a nice to have. Wouldn't it be lovely if our teachers were, all you know, feeling wonderful? But the truth is the bottom line and the IBO again are unequivocal about this it impacts the core business of the school and teacher well-being is a massive driver of school success. Ultimately, and I can't put it more clearly than that, we have a very well-respected organisation now coming out clearly and bringing together all that research and saying very, very crystal clearly this is an issue and I think that's great's great. It's very sad, but it's also great to have that evidence absolutely for sure.
Speaker 2:One of the things that uh jumped out at me about your book was talking about that recovery time or recovery experiences, and how essential that is for a lot of teachers. Even if they are able to say I'm leaving work at work, I'm not taking it home and doing marking in the evenings or on the weekend, a lot of teachers are still thinking about their kiddos, about the work, what do I have to do tomorrow, what's happening next week? And and you really highlight how important it is to have other experiences and time going on in our life Can you tell us a little bit more there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean again, the research is not mine, you know, this is a team in Germany who've dedicated their lives to this, and they identify four work recovery experiences which they say that we need to be experiencing regularly and frequently, not occasionally, and not just in the holidays. And the first and the most important is psychological detachment. So it is that switching off from thinking about work in our non-work time. And then the second one is relaxation. I think we all know what that is. The third one is control. We need to have control over how we spend our non-work time. So if we have children or elderly people that we're responsible for, we need to make sure that we're putting in place time for ourselves.
Speaker 3:And the final one, which surprises people, is mastery experiences, where we need to be experiencing a sense of accomplishment, and achievement that is not connected with our work.
Speaker 3:So that's hobbies and pastimes that get progressively more challenging, like learning a language or playing a musical instrument or getting better at making things, or you know, to give you an example, if you're going and running around the park and you're doing 5K and you're happy to just jog along at the same pace every time, that's relaxation. But if you're trying to beat your time. That's a mastery experience, and what we know from the research is that the benefit of a holiday and many people in the Northern Hemisphere are just coming to the end of their summer break now the benefit of that holiday lasts two weeks, three weeks maximum. We also know that the benefit of the weekend only lasts till Tuesday. So what we need to be doing is engaging in those kinds of work recovery experiences during the week, in the evenings and at weekends every weekend, not just occasionally and pushing through to the holidays like we do is very, very damaging for us.
Speaker 4:One of the things that we often talk about is calendaring, and so it's important to put some of these things in your calendar, because a lot of us live by the Google calendar or Outlook, and so when you were a school leader, how did you ensure that?
Speaker 3:because you were on the road to burnout, but how did you trying to do some of these things or support your community in doing that, because it's yeah, it's interesting to me that you mentioned the word calendaring because when I was preparing a little bit mentally earlier, when I was in the shower for this and I was thinking, if you know, they might ask me what's one strategy and for it's calendaring. So this isn't just about calendaring in your personal life, but it's about the responsibility that you take as a principal for the school calendar over the year and making sure that you're attending to those potential pinch points where people will become so overwhelmed with work that they're not having time to engage in those work recovery experiences. And that's when things start wobbling. And I learned that in my first year as a principal, so naively not attending to that and staff hating me and coming down so hard on me because I'd made things so hard for them. So I think this starts for the whole school, for the whole staff, in the previous year when we're setting the calendar up and we're thinking about what's happening across the year and collaborating with staff around that, rather than thinking that you know it all and you've got this covered and being prepared to learn from what went wrong the year before, so that we don't have things backing up and backing up and people becoming overwhelmed. But then, as far as your own personal situation is concerned, it has to be about planning and it has to be about being very firm about those boundaries and those routines.
Speaker 3:You know, we know, we know from the wonderful book Atomic Habits, which is one of the best books I can recommend for someone who's trying to get their house in order is that it's all about regularity and consistency in creating new habits so that those habits become the norm and then they become non-negotiables for you. You know, I think if we just what I've learned over the years working with many educators is that we know all of this it's not rocket science and these this inner voice is there, but we push the inner voice down and we ignore it and what we need to do is pay attention to that inner voice. This isn't healthy for me. I wonder what this is doing. Ok, I'm going to put something in place and I'm going to do is pay attention to that inner voice. This isn't healthy for me. I wonder what this is doing. Okay, I'm going to put something in place and I'm going to do it, and this is a priority.
Speaker 3:And if you can't exercise self-care because you feel guilty and you feel that it isn't right that you should be putting yourself first. Go back to what I said two questions ago about what we now know about the impacts of this on students. You know, I like to think for school leaders of self-care as being a core leadership attribute, and I think educators of all kinds need to think of it as being the core attribute at the center of their practice. Is that we're looking after ourselves because it matters to you and your family, but also because it matters to your students and to the school. You know you, you need to look after yourself so that you are there to give your best for others you are fit to serve.
Speaker 2:Just going back to the school calendar thing, 100% agree. There are so many things that happen in the year that are predictable that we should be able to see coming and work other things around it so that when things do pop up unannounced or unexpected, we're not all rushing around like headless chickens, right?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. But you know there's also the unpredictability isn't there, and that's where we come back to the pandemic. You know there's a chapter in my book about working through crises, you know. So those predictable things that we can control, let's be sensible about them, let's not plan to do too much and let's collaborate over because one person can't see the whole year. You've got to pick it up and look at it from so many different directions and you need collaboration and input from others in order to do that. And then, if we don't build the calendar so that we're flat out if unexpected things come, we've got a little bit of give. Things do come along again.
Speaker 3:It's essential that we collaborate. We listen to others, we listen to the issues that they're having and how it is from their perspective. We presume good intent, rather than presuming that people are lazy and they don't want to work hard. We presume that they're consummate professionals who are giving their best and if they're raising an issue, it's because there is a genuine concern and we listen to that and we address it. We don't have to come up with all the answers ourselves. The staff have the answers they know. We just need to listen to them. We need to tune in.
Speaker 4:What are you noticing now, post-pandemic, in the work that you're doing with schools? Are you seeing some of the same types of things? I guess we could like maybe categorize it like pre-pandemic, during pandemic and post. Are you seeing an increase in burnout or, like this, awareness is helping people recognize it? What's happening there?
Speaker 3:No, there's definitely an increase, and I think that it isn't just that we're more. An element of it, of course, tammy, is that we're more willing to talk about these things. Now there's less stigma, there's a lot more being written and said and spoken about mental health, and a lot of high profile people are prepared to talk about it, and so that's taken the stigma away. But it isn't just that. It's a couple of things we are suffering. We are experiencing a fallout from the pandemic with students, so what we're seeing are more students experiencing mental health issues, which has put in an enormous amount of strain on the system and on individual, individual teachers and leaders. We're seeing high rates of absenteeism with the students, more school refusal. We're seeing a lot more behaviour problems coming to the surface, a lot more special educational needs coming to the surface, and this is really putting everyone under an enormous amount of pressure. So I think that's where some of it's coming from.
Speaker 3:I think we're also seeing and it's interesting how I see this in pretty much every school that I work with all over the world, regardless of whether they're in a level of high deprivation or they're one of the wealthiest schools in the world is this desperation for connection and this reduction in the time available for community building and for people to be connected with each other.
Speaker 3:And that's a real shame, because the research shows and also my own experience of sitting for hundreds of hours in focus groups, listening to teachers and TAs and admin staff talk about their experience in the workplace is that if people feel connected to their colleagues and there is a positive workplace culture, they're much better able to manage and cope with the high levels of workload. When it all starts to wobble and go wrong is when the workplace culture is negative. And the research shows from both schools in the UK and international schools, that the majority of educators feel that their workplace culture is negative for a variety of reasons. So if we're constantly you you know snipping away at professional development time so that we're no longer providing opportunities during those days for people to come together and build community, because instead we're putting learning in place, people don't feel connected as much as they used to and that is having a devastating effect. And in the schools that I've been supporting, helping them to put that time back, you see an instant impact.
Speaker 2:So interesting, isn't it? Because I feel like you often hear from teachers like don't make me do team building, don't make me share out how I'm feeling or checking in with my. But there you go. There's that evidence that, over and over again, is I see the people in my corridor, but I don't see anybody else for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Speaker 3:And so if, in the in-service training day, what we've done is put in place a lunch where everyone's available at the same time, the school's provided some food and we've been given an hour where we can all sit down together and talk, it seems like something so simple, yet people appreciate that so much. Just those little things and letting those things go. We think, oh, they don't matter, they're not important, they're just small things. But I think what we have to acknowledge is that the little things are the big things and these small ways of connecting with each other are transformational, and I don't use that word lightly.
Speaker 4:Thank you, helen, for just all of your insights around the research you've done, your experience, what you see. We're at the point in the show where we ask our guests for a pare-down pointer, and maybe that was just it there, but just a quick tip or strategy for our listeners that they can take away from the show, right, I think.
Speaker 3:If I'm going to go with one thing that I think helps more than anything else, it's start the day with non-work thoughts. So this is a way that we create boundaries between home and work. So the first thing we do in the morning should not be reached to the bedside table and pick up the phone and look at our work emails. The longer that we can delay that, the better. So if we can get up, we can spend five minutes stretching, we can have a cup of tea out on the patio. If it's warm enough, without any technology, we can have a shower and sing in the shower. We can do anything that means we're not starting the day with this. That will have a massive impact on our cortisol levels and on our preparation and the way that we cope with things throughout the whole day. And it sounds so simple, but it's really effective.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, Helen. I'm doing that tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Good.
Speaker 4:Thanks for being with us this week, Helen. We appreciate it.
Speaker 2:It's been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Minimalist Educator podcast. Join Christine and Tammy and guests again next time for more conversations about how to simplify and clarify the responsibilities and tasks in your role. If today's episode helped you rethink, reimagine, reduce or realign something in your practice, share it in a comment or with a colleague in your practice. Share it in a comment or with a colleague. For resources and updates, visit planzeducationcom and subscribe to receive weekly emails. Until next time, keep it simple and stay intentional. Thank you.
