ISHN has gathered knowledge about Understanding Educators: Backgrounds, Beliefs, Work Lives & Concerns as part of better efforts to integrate health and social programs within education systems. Several articles in Volume 109, 2022 of Teaching and Teacher Education  provide much to add to our understanding. Teacher beliefs, concerns, working conditions, career patterns as well as different aspects of teacher education and development are discussed in the articles. If we are to work more effectively with teachers, we must better understand these things.
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The Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) thematic funding supports global and regional initiatives that use knowledge exchange, evidence and innovation to help developing countries solve critical educational challenges. A GPE discussion paper,Improving teaching and learning. A knowledge and innovation exchange (KIX) discussion paper was published in July 2019. The purpose of this paper is to describe the current landscape in improving teaching and learning and spark discussion and debate around potential areas for GPE/KIX investment. The "describes the challenges facing developing country to improve learning levels and reviews existing efforts to address those challenges through global goods. It identifies remaining knowledge and innovation gaps and offers a set of areas in which GPE could invest.
"focus on teachers and their work,and on three important sets of challenges that affect them:
1.The quality of support to teacher development. This includes weak content and pedagogical knowledge and classroom skills (including instructional practices) among teachers, often because of low quality of pre-and in-service teacher training. This is related to inadequate standards and accreditation for teachers and a lack of ongoing support and coaching from head teachers and other administrative leaders.
2.Teaching methods and learning materials.This includes a lack of textbooks and other learning materials;language issues, particularly around mother-tongue teaching; and teaching that is not aligned with children’s current level of understanding.
3.Systems for recruiting, managing and engaging teachers.This includes attracting and retaining the most qualified individuals to the teaching profession, deploying teachers to areas of the country with the greatest need, reducing unauthorized teacher absences and maximizing instructional time, and engaging teachers in policy dialogue and reform.
The GPE paper reviews several global and regional initiatives currently underway from UNESCO, GPE and other organizations that aim to improve the quality of teaching. A notable item in that list is the Breadth of Learning Opportunities initiative led by the Brookings Institution and Education International that includes physical health and emotional/social well-being.
The paper concludes by identifying five areas for investment. These include "sharing what works" to (a) improve data on teachers and teaching, enhance teacher recruitment, selection & retention, (c) improving accountability, incentives & rewards, (d) scaling up high quality teaching in early childhood and primary grades (e) enabling school and system level factors that support teaching (f) aligning budgets, planning and workforce changes to increase the number of teachers and transparency. 
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There has been increased attention to the beliefs and attitudes of teachers regarding health & social issues. However, the beliefs and attitudes of other professionals such as nurses and police officers that work with and in schools are less examined thus far in the research.  An article in Issue #6, 2019 of Educational Psychology provides a tool that can measure professional commitment to social justice. The authors "demonstrate a method for answering this question empirically – cognitive diagnostic modelling (CDM). We used the four dimensions of the Social Issues Advocacy Scale (SIAS; Nilsson, Marszalek, Linnemeyer, Bahner, & Hanson Misialek, 2011 Nilsson, J. E., Marszalek, J. M., Linnemeyer, R. M., Bahner, A. E., & Hanson Misialek, L. (2011). Development and assessment of the Social Issues Advocacy Scale. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(1), 258–275. doi:10.1177/0013164410391581[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]) as attributes of SJA, and fit SIAS responses to a CDM of 16 attribute mastery profiles. One-quarter of the sample had a profile suggesting SJA attitudes without action; one-fifth, a profile suggesting monitoring SJA in politics without participation; and one-eighth, a profile suggesting individuals rarely engage in action without SJA attitudes. We also found significant relationships between mastery profiles and degree pursued, degree field, and political affiliation. These results demonstrated the utility of CDM for training program assessment of SJA."  Read more...

(From the ISHN Member information service)   There are few studies that focus on teachers of health, personal and social development (HPSD)but, of the few, it can be said that there is remarkable number of new teachers assigned to teach HPSD who quickly seek a transfer to a different subject or leave the profession entirely. As part of a series of articles in Issue #1, 2015 of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education one author focuses on the experiences of new teachers who are assigned out of the field in which they were trained. "The lived experiences of novice teachers in out-of-field positions influence future career decisions and impact on their journey towards being competent and experienced practitioners, conversely their “life-world” is often misunderstood. The purpose of this article is to investigate the lived experiences of these teachers, how principals’ understanding and leadership styles influence the lived experiences of these teachers. The article  argues that the strategies implemented by school leaders based on their understanding of novice out-of-field teachers’ lived experience greatly influence the development of these teachers. It draws on Gadamer’s theories to investigate the lived experiences and perceptions of four principals and four novice out-of-field teachers through the different lenses of these participants. It concludes with a discussion on the interrelationships between school leaders’ understanding and novice teachers’ lived experience. Participants’ interpretation of specific lived experiences connected to out-of-field teaching shapes meaning in their attempt to understand and to “belong,” for example, confidence issues, self-esteem concerns, and disconnectedness."  Since very few education faculties offer specialized training or courses in HPSD, it would appear that the majority of these teachers will be left alone in their "out of field"assignments. In a profession that experiences high rates of turnover for all new teachers, this is particularly significant. Read more>>

(From the ISHN Member information service)   As with many other health issues, mental health advocates often focus on teachers as the key agent in school-based and school-linked mental health promotion. Their "mental health literacy", their willingness to care for their students and their roles in identifying, referring, managing students with problems, which are often presented as disruptive classroom behaviours, are added to their responsibilities to teach all students about mental health, social and emotional learning skills as well as promote mindfulness and resilience, encourage or discourage student friendships and inform, involve ,educate and support parents as well as involve community partners and work with self-help groups. An article in Issue #1, 2015 of Advances in School Mental Health investigated teacher perceptions about their roles and self-efficacy. The researchers note that "Interviews were conducted with 21 teachers from Canberra, Australia. Teachers viewed supporting student mental health as part of their role, though perceived a lack of knowledge and skills in mental health-related areas. They clearly emphasized the need to work within a well-coordinated pastoral care (or secular care) system". The researchers suggest that "Additional training in mental health and clear role delineation within the school may assist teachers to feel better prepared to effectively and appropriately support student mental health." Read more>>

(From the ISHN Member information service)  Most teachers enjoy their job, despite feeling unsupported and unrecognised in schools and undervalued by society at large, according to a new OECD survey. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) finds that more than nine out of ten teachers are satisfied with their jobs and nearly eight in ten would choose the teaching profession again. But fewer than one in three teachers believe teaching is a valued profession in society. Importantly, those countries where teachers feel valued tend to perform better in PISA. More than 100,000 teachers and school leaders at lower secondary level (for students aged 11-16) in 34 countries and economies took part in the OECD survey. It aims to help countries develop a high-quality teaching profession by better understanding who teachers are and how they work. 
Teachers Isolated: The survey shows that too many teachers still work in isolation. Over half report rarely or never team-teaching with colleagues and only one third observe their colleagues teach. Feedback is also rare, with some 46% of teachers reporting they never receive any from their school leader, and less than a third (31%) believe that a consistently underperforming colleague would be dismissed. But the survey shows that there is a lot teachers and school leaders can do about this: teachers who engage in collaborative learning have higher job satisfaction and confidence in their abilities. Participation in school decisions also boosts job satisfaction and makes teachers feel more valued in society.
Other key findings include:

• The average age is 43, with Singapore having the youngest teachers and Italy the oldest. More than nine in 10 (91%) have completed a university education and had teacher training (90%). A typical teacher has taught for around 16 years, usually full-time (82%) and on a permanent contract (83%).
  
• Around half of school leaders are male (51%), are around 50 years of age and have 21 years of teaching experience. They spend most (41%) of their time managing people and resources, planning and reporting
  
• The average class size is 24 students. Teachers spend an average of 19 hours per week teaching, ranging from 15 hours in Norway to 27 hours in Chile. But in about half of the countries, one in four teachers said they spend at least 30% of lesson time handling classroom disruptions and administrative tasks. Of an average total of 38 hours of work, seven hours per week are spent preparing lessons, five hours per week marking, and two hours per week on school management, working with parents and extracurricular activities.
  
• The survey challenges some stereotypical views of the profession. For example, job satisfaction rates are much more affected by classroom behaviour than class size. And most teachers find appraisals and feedback constructive: 62% of teachers, on average across countries, said that the feedback they receive in their school led to moderate or large improvements in their teaching practices.
  

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(From the ISHN Member information service) ISHN and ASCD have been sponsoring an international dialogue on how health 7 social programs can be integrated within education systems. One aspect of that suggests that H&S advocates should support a broad, liberal and student-centered approach to learning as outlined in the ASCD Whole Child approach. However, should we also be asking H&S advocates if they are actually doing that in their various instructional programs that seek to teach specific knowledge and skills about particular health or social topics? A recent blog underlines this question when it describes the difference between education and training (or education based on outdated factory models).  

The blog article, appearing in the Smart Blog on Education (Jun 9, 2014) suggests that " Our traditional approach to schools was based on a factory model where workers had to be “trained” to perform actions and repeat them in the same way and at the same time. Anything that distracted them from performing the way the factory prescribed was just a distraction to be extinguished as quickly as possible. A person’s natural interests, including the desire to socially connect to others, needed to be put aside in favor of the required work. Workers needed to be “trained” in a way of acting that was foreign to how they were naturally wired to learn. Since the work they did was arbitrary, relatively meaningless and tedious, they needed to be rewarded for performing in a certain way and penalized for performing in a different way." "In this factory model of schools, character and social/emotional skills are not integrated into the interactions between teachers and students. There is one main social skill: Do what you are told. Policymakers recognizing that schools are missing this social/character element decided to have character education and social emotional skill training inserted into the traditional structure of schools." "The environment and structure of a school sends a message to students that very often contradicts the content of many social emotional and character education programs. In addition, when the basic structure of schools does not change, neither do the attitudes of many teachers. It’s not surprising that many of them view these programs just as add-ons or distractions from teaching academic content. ".Instead of training students, schools should be educating them. Education comes from the Latin words e and ducere–meaning to lead out of. Education therefore is not about creating skills and abilities in people who are blank slates waiting to be shaped and molded. Education assumes that people come ready to learn with special abilities, capacities, interests and affinities, and need guidance and support from human relationships for their unique human qualities to come out." 

Based on this analysis, can we truly say that we are guiding students to learn about their health and social development based on their interests, needs and abilities, OR, are we designing instructional programs to teach specific, predetermined content to all students based on a factory style approach?  

From the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #1, 2014 of Physical and Health Education Academic journal review the socialization of PE teachers. The authors note that "Teacher socialization is a term used to describe the socializing processes that influence a teacher’s beliefs, assumptions, and values regarding teaching. The nature, quality and effectiveness of teaching is greatly influenced by a teacher’s early socializing experiences. Using Lortie’s (1975) theoretical framework, Lawson (1983a) identified three main kinds of socialization that teachers face: (a) Acculturation: this includes actions, beliefs, and value systems that are learned from birth and foster ideologies about, in this case, professional conduct. (b) Professional socialization: this is the process through which prospective and practicing teachers learn and maintain the values deemed ideal for teaching physical education. Professional socialization is strongly influenced by recruits’ experiences as a K-12 school student (the period of time described by Lortie 
(1975) as the apprenticeship of observation). These experiences inform recruits’ subjective warrant, which consists of their beliefs about the requirements for being a physical education teacher. (c) Organizational socialization: this process serves to maintain the “traditional skills” valued by institutions and organizations. Organizational socialization may work against change in order to uphold traditions and routines." 

The review (full text available free) concludes that "there have been several patterns to emerge in socialization research since 2000, most notably in the increasingly progressive, “teaching-oriented” views that many physical education recruits now hold. In particular, the findings suggest that teaching orientations are now more prevalent in recruits than they were prior to 2000. Attached to this finding is a general pattern that physical education teachers today are more likely now than in the past to develop a student-centered holistic approach to teaching physical education that develops the “whole-student”, one who is socially responsible and aware. While there appears to be less evidence supporting the presence of coaching orientations in recruits which is likely due to a change in the modern recruit’s acculturation, we feel that this finding should be treated with caution, as it does not suggest that coaching orientations are “things of the past” or are no longer present in physical education. There are still many recruits who do come to physical education with the aim of becoming coaches and the sport-centred philosophies to physical education content and pedagogy that tend to come with this mindset. Read more>>

(From Prevention Plus Wellness) Helping children, adolescents and young adults understand how health risk behaviors and health enhancing behaviors influence each other is critical to them making effective decisions for enhancing their whole health. In particular, youth need to know how substance abuse and health promoting habits affect each other to either enhance or interfere with their physical and mental health, perceived self-image, and achieving important life goals. In the past, health behaviors were viewed as being largely independent of each other. We now know that it is more common for youth to experience a number of co-existing unhealthy behaviors rather than a single behavior problem. These co-occurring behaviors influence each other both directly, as well as indirectly through common underlying risk and protective factors such as self-image and self-regulation skills. Effective prevention programs should therefore help young people identify how multiple areas of their lives interconnect to influence their future health, well-being and happiness. Below we provide some tips for teachers and parents on how to communicate with youth to help them make the connection between substance abuse and healthy behaviors. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) Advocates of health and social programs in schools who want to see initial teacher education programs modified would be well advised to read this article in Issue #4, 2013 of Action in Teacher Education. The "Process and Politics of the Redesign of an Undergraduate Middle-Grades Program" This article describes the guiding framework that led the process, the data collected, how that data was used to make decisions about learning experiences, the politics of the curriculum change, and the process that will be used to evaluate the program changes.  Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  An examination of the data from the School Health Policies & Practices Survey from 2000 and 2010 showed that teacher development activities were correlated with increased collaboration of lead health teachers with relevant school staff. However, the analysis, reported in the September 2013 issue of the Journal of School Health noted that while increased in-service development on nutrition and physical activity resulted in greater cooperation with nutrition and other school staff, the amount of staff development time on HIV prevention and substance abuse prevention and subsequent collaboration with other school staff declined in the same time period. The implications of this study likely go beyond collaboration to other areas such as teaching on different subjects, working with parents and more. In other words, without sustained teacher development support on specific health issues, the activities on those health issues may decline, even if there is work being done on other health issues. Is the sustainability solution really m ore funding for all issues, or does our approach to teacher development need to be more generic, working with teachers on all health issues if only a finite resource is available? Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) A blog post from Edutopia underlines the need to understand teacher belief systems when we try to integrate health & social programs more closely with their work. Robert Garmston (with co-author Arthur Costa) identifies six predominant ideologies that influence educators' decision making:

1. Religious Orthodoxy. This ideology aims to teach the habits and values that will lead to that religion's realization of how life ought to be lived in accordance with that faith. Educators driven by religious orthodoxy strive to help students learn appropriate norms and morality and to conduct their lives according to these norms.
2. Cognitive Process. Educators who are primarily aligned to this stance believe that the central role of schools is to help students learn to think, reason, and problem solve. Cognitive processors select instructional strategies that involve problem solving and inquiry.
3. Self-Actualization. Those who believe in self-actualization believe that the purpose of teaching is to bring out the unique qualities, potentials, and creativity in each child. They value student choice and self-directed learning, and are keen to provide for students' unique and multiple needs, interests, and developmental tasks.
4. Technologist. Technologists place strong emphasis on accountability, test scores, learning specific sub-skills and measurable learning. They might be "driven by data," and frequently use terms such as accountability, time on task, mastery, diagnosis and prescription. This is an ideology which as been adopted by many policy-making bodies in recent decades and is associated with external assessments, high stakes testing, and teacher performance.
5. Academic Rationalism. Academic rationalists believe that knowledgeable adults have the wisdom and experience to know what's best for students. They often deliver teacher-centered instruction, are drawn to the Classics, and use instructional strategies such as lectures, memorization, demonstration, and drill. They evaluate students through summative exams and content mastery.
6. Social Reconstructionism. Social Reconstructionists believe that the purpose of education is to help students become good citizens who can help take care of the world. They view learners as social beings who ought to be concerned with social, political, and environmental issues. They believe that education is an instrument of change and that schools are an institution charged with the responsibility of bringing about a better future and world. 

Elena Agular, the author of the Edutopi blog suggests that conflict among teachers can arise when these six beliefs collide. Now imagine the collisions when non-teachers, with different belief systems, seek to enter the school. Read More>> 

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #2, 2013 of the Asia-Pacific Journal on Teacher Education reports on a survey of 1397 teachers in Australia, followed by interviews with 37 teachers. the authors report that one-half to two-thirds of teachers were knowledgeable and confident about selected components of mental health promotion. The authors report that "Independent judgments by staff about students’ mental health status concurred with students’ scores on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in about 75% of cases, indicating a good level of staff awareness about students’ mental health status. Exposure to the KidsMatter Primary mental health promotion initiative was associated with improvements in teachers’ efficacy, knowledge and pedagogy, with small to medium effect sizes. Qualitative analysis indicated that teachers’ subject-matter and pedagogical knowledge were heavily reliant on curriculum resources." Implications of these findings are discussed. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) The school health movement has focused on transforming schools through "whole school" strategies. As proponents, we would learn much from reading Issue #2, 2013 of Improving Schools, where the concept of "schoolwide pedagogies" is discussed in a special issue. There are several articles but this quote from the concluding article is quite revealing. "The term schoolwide pedagogy was once rarely heard and yet has now become a part of most discussions around school improvement. But what does it really mean and why is the presence of a schoolwide pedagogical framework important? Some would say that in their school the adoption of an authoritative approach such as Habits of Mind, Bloom’s Taxonomies or the Productive Pedagogies is a schoolwide pedagogical framework. To some extent they are, but what is often lacking is the intellectual and social capacity that is built through collective professional sharing and articulation of strongly held beliefs about contextually relevant teaching and learning practices. Without this sense of ownership, teacher adoption ends up being sporadic at best with some teachers paying only lip service to imposed quality frameworks". If this is the case for matters at the heart of the school (ie how to teach), then what can we expect for matters such as health, which are often seen as secondary? (unless we truly understand and commit to working within schools in a sustained manner) Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) Knowing that there is often too much content to cover in a health/personal-social development curriculum, health advocates often suggest that other subjects be used to convey health messages. This is an attractive idea but a qualitative study from singapore, reported in Volume 31 of Teaching & Teacher Education, reports that implementing an integrated curriculum strategy may be difficult for teachers. The authors report that "In this qualitative study, we examined eleven Singapore teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning as related to their experiences implementing integrated curriculum. Interviews revealed that the teachers' conceptions of integration spanned the spectrum of ideas found in relevant literature. Further, although participants saw benefits to integration, including greater engagement of learners, they also spoke of significant obstacles to its implementation, such as teachers' own perceived lack of subject knowledge and a misalignment with the assessment system. The findings, while echoing previous studies conducted in various countries, highlight implementation difficulties in settings where high stake examinations and disciplinary-based curriculum prevail.". Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Volume 30, 2013 of the Journal of Teaching & Teacher Education explores how the micro=politics of the school, particularly the staffroom, where teachers spend much of their non-teaching time, as a key factor in teacher development, particularly their professional identity. The article examines the effect of the staffroom on beginning health/PE teachers. The authors suggest that "Staffroom occupants shaped situations which beginning teachers encountered. Micropolitical practices reflected personal and professional interests and knowledge. The staffroom context had the capacity to [re]shape beginning teacher learning."   Read more>>

(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #2, 2013 of Educational Psychology reports on the effect of a in-school team tea her development program to manage student conflicts in schools. The researchers report that " This study evaluated a professional learning approach using a core team (CT) model to assist primary (elementary) schools to develop whole-school collaborative conflict resolution processes. Thirteen schools were matched and randomly assigned to the enhancing relationships in school communities programme (n = 10) or a non-programme control group (n = 3). Programme schools provided a core (professional learning) team, who attended professional learning days, and disseminated programme content throughout their schools. Programme schools also received one full school staff workshop. After one year, CT participants were more likely to apply a collaborative conflict resolution model to problem scenarios and report greater knowledge and skills compared to non-programme-school control participants. Compared to the non-programme control group, non-core team programme school staff described using more cooperative approaches to handling conflict, especially when they had received more professional development from their CT. Programme school teachers taught more hours conflict resolution curriculum, and increases in hours taught by programme (but not control) teachers were associated with teacher reported increases in student understanding and use of cooperative methods. Patterns also supported a role of self-efficacy in implementation."  Read more>>

(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in the March 2013 issue of the Journal of Physical education, Recreation & Dance notes that negative early student experiences with PE and sports can last a lifetime and affect their levels of physical activity. The researchers report on "a survey that asked 293 students about recollections from their childhood or youth physical education and sport experiences revealed that participants who had been picked or chosen last for a team had a significant reduction in physical activity later in life. Long recognized as an "inappropriate" instructional practice by NASPE, "captains picking teams" still occurs in some physical education and sport settings." Read more>>