What is
Educator Well-being?
Educator well-being is for everyone, with ample benefits for professionals in the education sector and beyond.
What does Educator Well-being look like?
Educators engage in an intentional process to continue to nurture their skills, strategies, and confidence. Specifically, Educator SEL includes two core components:
(1) competencies — processes educators take to nurture their personal, social, and cognitive competencies (e.g., understanding and managing emotions, forming meaningful relationships, making helpful choices)
(2) strategies — the ability to translate knowledge of healthy learning, relationships, and skill development to strengthen students’ personal, social, and academic competencies.
Harmony offers three resources for Educator Well-being:
- Educator Well-being Pathway
- Module connection to Harmony unit themes
- Harmony Implementation Support: Think On It, Act On It
Why Educator Well-being Is Important
Investing in oneself pays dividends. Educators with higher personal and relational competencies form better relationships with students, have better classroom management, less controlling classrooms, and support their students more. Harmony provides multiple resources and partners to support educator competencies and capacities so children can thrive.
Who Benefits From Educator Well-being?
- Administrative staff
- Administrators
- Caregivers
- Central office staff
- Communities and agencies
- Schools and school districts
- Teachers
- Transportation workers
- Youth organizations
Elevate Your Impact to Help Children Thrive
At Harmony Academy, we believe in the transformative power of supporting the Whole Educator who can cultivate their personal and relational competencies. With the right knowledge, skills, and attitude they can become catalysts for profound and positive change in the lives of children.
Through our Educator Well-being Pathway, we support the Whole Educator by building the essential skills and techniques required to create better-managed classrooms that not only foster nurturing environments and healthier relationships, but also facilitate improved academic outcomes for every child.
Educator Well-being Pathway
Personal, Social, and Academic Competencies
Through the Educator Well-Being Pathway, Harmony provides modules focused on the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive competencies. Educators develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to support them in interacting with themselves, students, colleagues, leaders, and families in a way that fosters healthy learning, relationships, well-being, and success for all.
Intrapersonal Competencies
Intrapersonal competencies include individual knowledge, attitudes, and skills that focus on the self. These include identifying and regulating emotions, understanding beliefs, mindsets, and assumptions, goal-setting and monitoring, and stress reduction techniques.
Interpersonal Competencies
Interpersonal competencies include the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that help individuals interpret others’ behavior, navigate social situations, build and maintain relationships, and work effectively with others.
Cognitive Competencies
Cognitive competencies include the knowledge, attitudes, and skills individuals need to direct their behavior toward helpful actions, including problem-solving, decision-making, and prioritizing based on competing demands.
Harmony Professional Learning Modules Connect to Harmony Curriculum
Educator Healthy Learning Strategies
Integrate personal, social, and academic practices into your classroom and accelerate your Harmony implementation and student development by engaging in our free, on-demand Harmony Professional Learning Modules.
Each Harmony unit provides 2-3 modules to help you further develop your capacities related to each Harmony unit theme while understanding how promoting well-being can foster positive growth and relationships.
Example: Unit 3, “Communicating with Each Other”
Get a small preview of the healthy environment-aligned modules you can use to make a difference below:
Build your knowledge to support a harmonious learning environment by engaging in our free, on-demand module, “Preparing for Student Discussions.” In this module, you will identify ways to create a classroom environment that promotes enriching conversations by creating norms, considering logistics, and modeling desired skills for your students.
You can also review the free, on-demand module, “Strategies for Communicating With Parents.” In this module, you will
discover some helpful do’s and don’ts for effective teacher-family communication.
Harmony Implementation Support:
Relevancy, Think On it, Act On it – Educator Competencies and Strategies
To demonstrate personal, social, and academic competencies and strategies that educators need to nurture and model through Harmony, each Harmony unit asks educators to consider why these competencies are important (Relevancy). Additionally, each unit helps them frame their own competency development (Think on It) and understand contextual influences on student development (Act On It).
Relevancy: Building Our Knowledge
This section builds educator capacity for healthy learning strategies by providing up-to-date research on why student personal, social, and academic competencies and sub-competencies targeted in each Harmony unit are critical.
Think on It: Reflecting on Our Assumptions
With this section, educators can take a step back and reflect on what they know about relationship skills and how students and adults use them (self and social awareness). Everyone is different, and this section allows educators to assess how their use of healthy learning competencies may be similar or different to others in the field through reflection prompts zeroing in on student interactions.
Act on It: Understanding Our Students in Context
One of healthy learning’s most significant advantages is how it looks at each student and addresses their needs individually. Throughout this section, educators learn how context, background, and lived experience can help or hinder student development. Educators will also learn how to nurture each student’s individual strengths and assets through action steps or strategies. They will learn to understand and support their students in an informed, nurturing way.
The Educator Well-being Pathway was developed in collaboration with experienced academic leaders, administrators, and researchers who share a targeted interest in healthy learning as a gateway to more inspirational teaching. We thank and acknowledge the following professionals for their hard work:
Executive Leadership
Michael Cunningham, PhD
Chancellor Emeritus
Senior Vice President
Scott Page
Senior Editorial Lead
Nick Yoder, PhD
Subject Matter Experts
American Institutes for Research
Jenny Donahue, PhD
Megan Gilden
Sara Wolforth
Technology Lead
Richie Ressel
Expert and Educator Reviewers
Frances Gipson, PhD
Doug Fisher, PhD
April Knoer
Sarah Frayer
Ready to bring the benefits of personal, social, and academic learning to students in your community?
Register for Harmony at no cost today!