Lesson 6: Instructor well-being in the classroom
How instructor well-being supports teaching and learning
Supporting student mental health and well-being requires tending to your own well-being first.
In this lesson we discuss the PERMA model (Kenny, 2018) as a framework for guiding your own well-being in the classroom. We also discuss resilience in teaching, and methods to support your teaching team, particularly teaching assistants. We will also discuss strategies for managing workload in an University environment.
Lesson checklist
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
- Use the PERMA model to identify supports for yourself and for students to promote well-being in the classroom.
- Identify strategies for managing workload.
- Consider well-being for the entire teaching team.
Using the PERMA Model to promote well-being in the classroom
The classroom represents both the place where students learn, and also the place where instructors work. As a workplace, stressors such as workload and job demands can combine with teaching stressors planning and managing class and supporting students.
The PERMA Framework for flourishing (Seligman, 2012, Kenny 2018) has five facets which can help you promote your well-being in the classroom and also support other members of your teaching team.
Positive Emotions: Reduce stressors, promote positive coping & resilience
- Be aware of your current mental health.
- Establish classroom boundaries.
- Establish a self-care plan.
- Expand your set of coping strategies for stress.
Engagement: Create meaningful opportunities to draw on strengths & interests
- Include your passions in your teaching.
- Share your own academic work as part of your teaching and engage with your students over it.
- Share, co-construct and gather feedback on course materials.
- Empower students, reinforce they are colleagues/scholars with something to contribute.
Relationships: Promote opportunities for collaboration & interaction
- Connect with your communities of practice.
- Invite people (especially other instructors) for coffee.
- Recognize and praise your colleagues.
- Seek mentorship opportunities.
Meaning: Connect to purpose & promote reflection
- Develop your teaching philosophy and portfolio.
- Share your experiences with your communities of practice.
- Find formal venues to share your teaching experience.
- Seek volunteer opportunities in your field.
Accomplishment: Develop autonomy & celebrate success
- Have a plan to celebrate your goals and achievements.
- Keep folders (physical and online) of positive notes you receive from your students.
- Display your certificates and awards where you see them regularly.
- Share your successes with your community.
Reflection
Using the PERMA Worksheet, consider how you might add practices such as these into your classrooms.
Building resilience in teaching
Developing skills and knowing how and where to access supports for resilience helps to establish more capacity in the classroom. This greater capacity can help reduce stress and improve your ability to support students who have their own needs in the classroom. By modelling resilience, you can also teach students how to access greater resilience in their own lives. (Thannhauser, 2019).
Establish a Growth Mindset
A growth mindset reflects a belief that people can change, grow and learn. It is common to help encourage students to develop a growth mindset to increase their resiliency in their learning, but it can also help develop resiliency in teaching. A few reflective questions which might support a growth mindset include:
- What aspects of the lesson worked well? What aspect of that lesson didn’t work as well as I’d hoped? Are there aspects in what didn’t work that I can use to build a better lesson?
- What are the micro-goals I can plan out to make this lesson easier for me to work though, remember and evaluate?
- What skills do I need to gain or practice to teach this lesson in a way that feels better and is more effective?
- How am I modeling growth mindset in a way that students and colleagues can use to develop their own growth mindset and become more resilient.
Clarify priorities and set goals
- Taking time to establish your priorities in the classroom can help you spend your time in ways that mean more to you. Identifying your priorities also helps you to establish what support you can provide towards the priorities of students, your teaching team, your institution and the world-in-general. Having clear priorities which you can communicate also helps people to understand what they expect from you.
- Developing S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based) goals can help create a regular feeling of accomplishment which can help (Doran, 1981). Goals which support each other, but don’t depend on each other – so you can switch between goals when progress is blocked on one – can also help build resiliency.
Consider creating a visual calendar of regular and one-off commitments. This can help manage when additional meetings or administrative work would overload your schedule and when you might have the time to take on additional work.
Blocking time to mark in your calendar when assignments are due can help make sure you have time to give quality feed back and aren’t interrupted while you focus.
Some suggestions that may help to manage instructor workload are included for your consideration:
- Do not do a complete overhaul of a course every time you teach it. You may want to make small changes, but do not change every aspect of it, requiring you to spend a lot of time redesigning elements of the course
- Ask to teach the same course multiple times to cut down on the amount of prep you need
- Beware of scope creep in terms of your course. Over time, a course can become bloated with content, assignments, and expectations for learning outcomes. This adds to the workload for both students and instructors. It can be challenging to separate the “need to know” from “nice to know” in a course, but it is essential to evaluate it from time to time to ensure that a 3-credit course is manageable.
- Teaching tends to be an individual activity and can be lonely at times. It might feel like you have a lack of support. If you are looking for someone to bounce ideas off of or commiserate when things don’t go as planned, find a trusted colleague who wants to discuss teaching practice. There might be a mentoring program you could join, or a Community of Practice (CoP) that focuses on classroom teaching.
- Leverage learning technologies for efficient grading while giving students feedback on their learning:
- Use rubrics to communicate to students the main takeaways from their work. Add written comments judiciously as needed.
- Provide audio or video feedback if it saves you time.
- Keep a “bank” of instructor comments for the points that you tend to make multiple times (Aparicio-Ting, 2023).
- Set realistic expectations for students regarding your availability and response times to questions and emails. You may want to include a statement in your course outline about when you will respond, such as:
- I will typically respond to student queries within 24 hours during the week, and 48 hours on the weekend. I will not be monitoring my email on the weekend or during holidays.
Supporting Mental Health and Wellness for the whole Teaching Team
Beyond establishing a healthy environment for students and yourself, it is also important to consider other members of your teaching team, particularly Teaching Assistants. Both graduate and undergraduate Teaching Assistants can experience specific stressors which are different than those of instructors or students. While responsibility for managing and mitigating these stressors and supporting teaching assistants’ well-being is shared across the institution, as an instructor there are some things that may help in the setting of a course.
- It is likely that students are taking on many responsibilities at the same time for various reasons. In addition to their own course work and programs, they may be acting as teaching assistant for several different courses, as well as volunteer activities and work outside of university.
- Students take on a Teaching Assistant role for many reasons, including an interest in teaching. Taking the time to involve teaching assistants in the creation and planning of the course can have a large impact on their feeling of belonging and on their skills in the future.
Actions
Having clear and regular ways to communicate can help Teaching Assistants address issues affecting them in the classroom. Creating or co-creating practices and guidelines around communication can help improve clarity about expectations, resource availability and generally improve teaching assistants’ well-being.
Taking the time to discuss each teaching assistant’s personal context early in the course can help establish good boundaries for both instructor and teaching assistant and to help ensure that the right support is available for instructor and students at the right times throughout the semester. Be mindful that TAs sign a contract with a certain number of hours allotted to your course and your expectations should align with that.
Providing tools for teaching assistants, like rubrics, student conduct policies and workload agreements can also help support teaching assistants in developing as instructors and reduce stress.
While many teaching assistants have a strong interest in teaching, as well as many applicable skills, they may not have the experience or skills the need for all of the tasks for your course. Make sure that teaching assistants have the time for training and that you are able to assess their learning and support their learning appropriately while you collaborate.
One finding in (Malette 2018) is that teaching assistants often reach out to other teaching assistants for support around mental health and well-being. While the findings in Malette are focused primarily on department or faculty units, identify if there are mechanisms you can use to create peer-support structures within your class for your teaching assistants.
Mental health support at UCalgary
- Wellness Online- this website has a number of self-help tools, videos, and online resources that students can access 24/7
- Peer Support: many offices, including SWS, Women’s Resource Centre, Q Centre have trained volunteers available to talk to students in a non-judgmental, safe space about issues they are facing.
- Health Promotion & Outreach: this involves various events, initiatives and programs that focus on student health, mental health, and overall well being
- Mental Health Training: mental health, helping skills and suicide intervention certificate trainings that students can take part in to both improve their own mental health and support others going through a difficult time.
- https://www.ucalgary.ca/wellness-services/suicide-awareness-and-prevention/reach-out
- Wellness Workshops & Mental Health Education Groups- workshops & groups on a variety of topics, including anxiety management, self-care, mood management, and more
- 24/7 After-Hours support for students who call our center after hours they can be connected to our community partners at the Distress Centre or Woods Homes
References
Abegglen, S., Akhbari, M., Albright, S., Brown, B., Burns, T., Clancy, T. L., Din, C., Faunt, M., Gospodinov, J., Hill, J., Huenchullan, S. R., Kamal, S., McLaughlin, E., Nowell, L., Parker, S. I. A., Porter, A., Presiloski, A., Rozanski, C., Sinfield, S., Thomas, C., & Wolfe, K. (2024). Students as Partners in Higher Education: Perspectives and Practices (M. Arcellana-Panlilio & C. Jeffs, Eds.). University of Calgary, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning Guide Series. https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/43123
Aparicio-Ting, F. (2023). Efficient online grading with feedback. In M. Arcellana-Panlilio, P. Dyjur and A. C. Wright (Eds.), Fostering student success in online courses (pp. 8-13). Taylor Institute for Teaching & Learning guide series, University of Calgary. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/teams/1/Resources/23-TITL_Student%20Success%20Guide_Feb23FINAL.pdf
Doran, G. T. (1981). There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives. Management Review, 70, 35-36.
Government of Canada. (2025). The mental health continuum model. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/benefits-military/health-support/road-to-mental-readiness/mental-health-continuum-model.html
Kenny, N. A. (2018). The PERMA model: Strategies for promoting workplace flourishing. Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/resources/the-PERMA-model-strategies-for-promoting-workplace-flourishing
Malette, N. (2018). Teaching Assistant wellness: Individual, social & structural strategies UBC Sustainability Scholars report. https://sustain.ubc.ca/about/resources/teaching-assistant-wellness-individual-social-structural-strategies
Ovie, G. (2020). Coping with crisis: The mental health and self- care of crisis leaders in higher education. Journal of Educational Thought, 53. 49-66. 10.55016/ojs/jet.v53i1.71096
Seligman, M. (2012). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria books.
Thannhauser, J. (2019), Four Practices to Boost Your Resiliency. Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary – Resource Library. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/resources/four-practices-to-boost-your-resiliency
Lessons
Lesson 1: Introduction to mental health and well-being in the classroom
Lesson 2: Indigenous conceptualizations and approaches to well-being
Lesson 3: Well-being and course design
Lesson 4: Trauma-informed teaching
Lesson 5: Supporting student well-being in the classroom
Lesson 6: Instructor well-being in the classroom
Authors
Dr. Patti Dyjur, PhD
Educational Developer
Dr. Sreyasi Biswas, PhD
Educational Developer
Jaclyn Carter PhD (c)
Educational Developer
Dr. Tyson Kendon, PhD
Digital Learning Platforms Team Lead
Dr. Christine Martineau, PhD
Educational Developer
Dr. Anna Pletnyova, PhD
Educational Technologist