The Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS) Disability Benefits Plan (DBP) coordinates the short- and long-term insurance for member teachers – including principals and vice-principals across the province. We know that, currently, approximately 60 % of our short-term claims and 50% of our long-term claims are related to mental health. Upon examining this further, we noticed a large percentage of these claims came from interpersonal relationships: with school leadership but also with colleagues and parents. We have figured that every dollar spent on early intervention saved the Plan three dollars. Knowing this, we began to explore how we could work with school leadership around the idea of psychological safety in the hopes of reducing the amount of mental health claims we were receiving.
The questions in this interview are meant to a) highlight the salient features of the project to date concentrating on school leadership and b) inspire readers to look further into both the phenomenon of psychological safety in the working environment of the school and the place of school leadership in it.
Shauna Streich is a case manager for MTS DBP and the lead facilitator of the Psychological Health and Safety Project (PSHP). Chris Hicks is the Chairperson of the Council of School Leaders of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (COSL) and the President-Elect of the Canadian Association of Principals.
Can you describe how the project evolved and its focus on school leadership?
Three years ago, I was asked by the Lord Selkirk School Division to do a series of four sessions with the leadership group on Wellness. Because we had been talking about expanding our early intervention program at the DBP, we thought, this could be a cool opportunity to introduce some of the concepts around psychological health and safety, with leadership. And then the project just got its own momentum. We started talking about how do we introduce it into schools? Then the superintendent got onboard with all of that. He agreed to do the Guarding Minds survey (www.guardingmindsatwork.ca), which is a measure of psychological safety, and that allowed us to get a sense of how the employees in the school division were feeling. Not only could we get a general sense from the division, but we also had it broken down by school and by every position in the school division. From there we could see how each school was doing and make plans with the leaders about what areas to focus on. The following year, we actually moved into the schools and began to work with them individually. And that’s when they really started to engage. We talked about return-to-work scenarios. We talked about building organizational culture. How do we want to handle parents? How do we welcome people back from leaves? How do we want to manage a school when people have to go on leaves? We just started talking about all the hard topics and started to make plans for each school around that.
Then, in the spring of that year, we wanted to dive a little deeper into the Guarding Minds data and get a sense from all staff, about how the Guarding Minds questions was interpreted from their standpoint, because the Guarding Minds data was never designed for education, and when people were giving answers, it wasn’t clear whether they were giving answers about the schools or whether they were giving answers about the division. Also, questions like, “Have you ever been bullied? Well, what does bullying mean to you? Do you feel safe to speak up?” These are all major markers of psychological safety. Why or why not? Like, what’s that about? It’s great to say, okay, that you don’t feel safe speaking up, but why or why not? We decided we were going to begin to do focus groups with the Guarding Minds data as our benchmark. And so, we talked to everybody. We talked to administrators, we talked to senior leadership, we talked to teachers, we talked to EAs, we talked to bus drivers, secretaries, everybody. Anybody could volunteer to come to the focus groups. We brought food, and we sat down with them for an hour and a half, and from that, we got this really amazing data around their concerns.
That was the end of year two. We analyzed that data and took it forward to senior leadership. They came up with planning for how to improve psychological safety, and then this third year for them has been that implementation piece.
In general, the conversation was around how do we continue to integrate this because psychological health and safety cannot be an initiative. It must be embedded into everything the division does.
When you talk about implementing the data, how does this look? If I’ve looked at the data and said, “I have to do something with this”, what’s an example of something I would do?
Things they targeted included, expanded role and school specific training for EA’s, improved check-ins and reporting following violent incidents, dedicated time for elementary staff to complete reports cards, a mentorship program for new teachers and administrators, and increased coordinated visits to schools by senior leadership. They looked at things like building community throughout the division and making improvements to PD days. They also looked at how they could make their leadership meetings more effective.
You mentioned something about, “Do you feel safe speaking up?”
Yes. So, communication. We talked about what makes people feel gaslit, especially when problem solving around students that were particularly challenging and how do we manage it? What we learned is that when people don’t know what to do, they tend to do nothing. And so instead of just talking about it and saying, “Hey, I’m not really sure what to do, can we brainstorm this?”, they would often say, “We never got the email. I never got your email.” “Oh, really? Because I sent 5 of them, and they all had read responses on them.” It wasn’t anything malicious. It was just a thing where people just didn’t know what to do until they had to do something, So, communication was a huge one. You know, how do we disperse information throughout the division? How do we get information to EAs when they don’t have access to their phone or access to computer? How do we tell them about things that are happening the day before with students they’re working with? Perhaps their parents announce that they’re getting divorced. Well, that’s going to impact that child the next day. You need to let that EA know what’s going on, possibly for their own safety. How do we do that when they have no access to emails? We learned, too, that there’s indirect leadership that happens. Like sometimes student support teachers are often made into an unofficial leader of EAs, but do they have the training to be that? Have we given them the training to manage people? So, we discovered things like that. So how do we support them to support others? How do we look at something like incident reporting? When somebody has had a very difficult thing happen, does it always have to be the principal that they come and talk to? Maybe that’s not their safe person. Who’s their safe person? Are we trauma informed when we’re doing debriefing? We uncovered a bunch of these little pockets that were contributing to people’s well-being that the school division could begin to act on by asking “How do we give support to these indirect leadership people? How do we make sure EAs feel more a part of the general culture? Itinerant teachers, for example, they end up reporting very, very high levels of loneliness. That was also a general finding, that staff feel lonely. Something like 74% of teachers in Canada feel lonely and that wasn’t much different in Lord Selkirk. Why? That was that was part of our discussions (Ed. Note: This is discussed further below).
Can you go into a little more detail about the fundamental structure of the project? What do you want to learn and what do you want to do to support participants?
What we learned in Lord Selkirk and the work we’ve done with other divisions, is that you really didn’t need four sessions to start this process. We kind of felt we could wrap that into two mornings easily. In the first one we teach them about, “What is psychological safety?” and some of the components related to that. And then the second session is, “Okay, great. “How do I do that? How do I implement that in a school? What would it look like?” So, we just now have distilled that down and then we begin working with the principals individually in their schools. We will sit with them, learn about their environment, and ask “What are the challenges for their school? What are those challenges with their staff? Do they have a lot of staff that’s been around forever? Or do they have new staff, new teachers? Is leadership new, or have they been there for a while?” Because each of those presents different challenges in terms of building culture and building a sense of well-being. The schools we’ve worked with, they’ve done Guarding Minds, so we have a starting point, but often what happens with any survey, is the data gets outdated very quickly. You do it at a point in time. By the time you get around to working with it, it’s a year later. Well, they could have six new staff, or they could have new leadership. And so, it’s not as relevant. If the principals want more updated information, then we’ll sit down with the staff, we ask the leaders to leave, and them ask them narrative questions, and we’ll have them submit their answers in an anonymous fashion. We’ll analyze all the data, some of the trends, what’s working well, where do they feel like they’re struggling? What topics do they struggle to talk about? Do they feel lonely? Do they feel safe to speak up? All the kind of key markers around psychological safety. We prepare a report for the principal, and then we begin to use that to collaboratively make the action plan, as opposed to just general ideas about psychological safety. It’s much more customized, and we like this idea of the collective approach. For well-being to work in a school, everybody has to be on board. And I think that was our learning – it is absolutely the leaders’ who are imperative to establishing a safe environment in a school and developing this sense of well being. But they’re [the school leadership] not the only person who’s responsible. Everybody plays a role, and so our learning has been about expanding on the question of what collectively can we do to help our leaders? Whether that’s telling us what you need, whether that’s taking on certain things.
So, we just wrapped up a year using this new format with a different school division. And we sat down on the last day and each school – we worked with 17 schools in this division – did a little presentation on what they learned. What surprised them? What are they doing in the future? And then we all sat and had a collective discussion on what we could learn from each other. And it was amazing to see them going from just learning about a new topic and how to do it, to now collaborating together and saying, “Okay, how do we give this to other schools? How do we mentor other schools? How do we continue this going?” So ideally, when we had this model in mind, it was that we would support them, and then they would begin to take it and mentor themselves. They would have their own kind of champions within the school division. Train the trainer almost. Because that’s how you keep things moving, by people seeing the value of it.
And so now what’ll be really interesting is how does that affect things like fail to fill? (Ed. Note: “Fail to fill” refers to unfilled staff absences in a school day) How does that affect sick time? How do we see it translate into the claims we get in the disability benefits department? All of those things are going to be Phase Two of our learning as we continue to work with more schools. How do we integrate, and see, what’s been the change? That’s what we want to continue to monitor.
Now that we’ve had quite a bit of discussion about the broader guidelines and goals of the project, I want to ask you about any specific scenarios that you found compelling or some surprises that you can that you can mention.
I think there were a number of compelling things that came out of that closing session that we had with that school division in May. School leaders were very vulnerable and open to talking about how hard this process is. It takes a very special school leader to give us their staff and say, “Go ahead, ask them whatever you want. And I’m open to that feedback”. That takes a really courageous leader and it’s hard to sit there and listen to some of the comments that people say and not take that personally. And we had 17 of them do that. Not to the same degree, but that we’re willing to kind of say, “Hey, I’m willing to look at this, and I think that that was extremely compelling. It says a lot about the nature of these school leaders, and how much they are invested in their staff’s well-being. Because remember, this project is about staff well-being. We know that when you have healthy staff, that trickles down to healthy students. So, we were very intentional, this is not about the kids. This is about staff.
But one of the things that we did that was really neat, and that school leaders are using now with their staff is the VIA character strengths (https://www.viacharacter.org/. This allows us to really get a sense of who people are, outlining a ranking of 24 strengths, focusing on their top five strengths and their bottom five. And it’s not that one is your strength and one is your weakness. The top five, are strengths that are just kind of natural for you and give you energy. And the bottom five strengths aren’t necessarily things that you are bad at more that they take your energy. And so, when we had several of our leaders do the survey, their number one strength, or in their top 5, was honesty. Honestly is a strength that can come across as straightforward or even sometimes mean, because the thought process with this group is sometimes, “Just do it, or it’s your job”. Also, we don’t have all of our staff members with honesty in their top five and so they had to recognize that their staff see the world differently than them. And it is extremely compelling to see them have that ‘aha’ moment and how they’re going to adjust. They recognize that part of it has to do with them, and the way they see the world. They didn’t always see it before.
We also learned that leaders tend to overestimate by 20% how well their staff is doing. When you give them an anonymous opportunity, boy, the feedback was a lot different than what they were hearing in their office. Because the bottom line is, as a principal or vice principal, people see you differently, whether you want them to or not. So how are you going to get that ongoing feedback from them? And so, you’ll see things like some people do suggestion boxes, some people do anonymous surveys.
One of the other big things that came up is staff feel underrecognized. What does that look like? That’s a big one. If school leaders don’t see recognition as something that they need, it’s difficult for them to give that recognition. And so, we talked about things like, it’s not just pizza lunches. It’s in the hallway saying,” Hey, I saw you handle that student today. You did a really great job”. Or “I heard you had a difficult conversation with a parent. I heard you handled it amazing. Thank you for that”. It’s those little things. It’s being seen in the hallway. It’s, “Hey, how did your daughter’s team do at hockey last night?” All those things make a difference to staff.
In terms of surprises, I would say it was the loneliness thing. It was fascinating to me that you could spend time with people all day long and feel lonely at the end of the day. That kind of revealed responses like, “I don’t like to go to the lunchroom because it’s negative. It’s cliquey.” So then then you would see school leaders’ figure, well, so then let’s change that”. Is it time to change the setup of the furniture? Some of them had activities in there (the staffroom) for people to do, so you could get them talking. How do we include people? Do we have group chats going on that some people aren’t part of? How do we welcome new staff? Some people felt scared to leave their classroom because it’s scary in the hallway. Sometimes we see that in high schools, right? So, I just stay in my classroom. I feel, safe there. Right? So, we talked about that. We talked about how much less socializing we do now since COVID. We stopped doing social things as a staff because COVID just made us so isolated. Maybe some staff don’t want to go out after work and that’s okay. People have families, but maybe some do want to. So, it’s just reintroducing some of these things, and having conversations about what do we want as staff in this school.
I’d like to look at something a little more specific to, and you’ve touched on a lot of it anyway, but when you consider the role that school leaders play in the in the culture of the building what has stood out to you?
I would say that it’s, it’s almost unfair how much responsibility school leaders have in the culture of the building. It is absolutely the biggest factor in how staff feel about what’s going on in their building. When we do focus groups, they were literally saying it really depends on leadership. And that’s a lot of pressure, especially when you think about all the roles that principals have, and all the balls that they keep in the air, and all the conflicting things that they have to be dealing with. And then to say to them, also, “Can you please create a psychologically safe environment for your staff, which to some degree, are never going to be 100% happy? We know that that’s impossible. But we know that if they can create an environment where people feel safe to speak up, that when they speak up that it matters and that their leader is genuinely interested in the well-being of their staff, that this has a tremendous impact on resilience, on the amount they come to work on how often they get sick, how often they help each other out, and even how often they’ll volunteer for things. All of those things, we know are impacted by how people feel about their working environment. It’s really interesting.
So, you’ve elaborated in great detail on your findings. What lies ahead for the for the PHSP (Psychological Health and Safety Project)?
We are going to continue to offer this to other school divisions. We will continue to refine how we do this so that it is most efficient for principals, because as you know, they don’t have a lot of time. We want the information that we’re giving them, the time we spend with them, to be useful and something that they can build on. So, we’ll continue to work with schools. We’ll continue to work with divisions. We hope to have offerings for individual principals, if they want more help. We really want to give principals as much support as we can, because to be honest, when we look at the school leadership, they’re not always given a lot of resources. They come up through the education system with all this training on how to deal with kids, and they don’t necessarily have the tools to deal with adults. And adults can be hard, and I think take up a larger chunk of their time than they ever expected. That’s where we want to support them. We recognize that it’s hard. We recognize what a toll it takes, and we want to be there for them. They’re looking for more information. One thing we’re looking at is the tools and assessments themselves. Maybe there are more efficient ways to make this work, ways more adaptable to their time constraints. What are better ways to get information to and from them? So, the program will adapt based on the feedback we are getting butultimately it’s about supporting principals to support staff around the concepts of psychological health and safety and building cultures of well-being.
