TOWARDS WELL-BEING AT SCHOOL WITH INTEGRATIVE PEDAGOGY

The purpose of this presentation is to consider intervention for developing school well-being and preventing bullying from the perspectives of the school community and the professional development of the school staff. Finnish comprehensive school teachers are highly educated and motivated for their jobs. This has seen as one of the reasons for the good learning results in the academic skills of pupils. There is, however, a need for improvement in the social skills and well-being of pupils. Bullying in schools is also a common issue. At present there are several different methods available, both for intervening in bullying and for teaching social skills to students. Still, when teachers, parents and pupils encounter bullying situations, they usually feel powerless. The methods for reducing bullying also concentrate on individual factors affecting well-being. What is needed is a targeted and systematic operational culture, in which the teacher is the strategic leader of the social well-being in the classroom. Secondly, teachers together with other school professionals need training, both as individuals and as a community, to develop their expertise in creating a culture of well-being.

Based on earlier research, certain factors need to be taken into account in effective interventions: 1) Development and intervention should cross the boundaries between different subjects and professionals. 2) Intervention should be long enough. 3) Both the intervention and its implementation should be research-based. 4) Action should be looked at from the viewpoint of its impact on both evaluation and development. 5) Intervention should be evaluated from the viewpoint of both individual and community levels.

This qualitative case study examined how teachers and other professionals in school community prepared working methods for improving school well-being in everyday schoolwork. The formal knowledge of the intervention is based on Hamarus’s (2008) Balanced Well-Being Promotion Model®. The development process of school professionals is based on integrative pedagogy (Tynjälä 2007; 2008; Tynjälä & Kallio 2009). The data (N=35 school professionals) are composed of focus groups, interviews, memos and observations in intervention during three semesters.

The results show that teachers experienced pedagogical discussions to be the most important working method in the development process. Through pedagogical discussions, school professionals built a shared understanding and shared practices in the complex phenomenon of school well-being. That also reflected occupational well-being and job satisfaction. Furthermore, the results indicate that when trying to advance school well-being, it is vitally important to take the time and space for pedagogical and target–oriented discussion in the whole work community. There is also a strong possibility that target-oriented and holistic understanding of school well-being in the school community effectively prevents school bullying.

Integrative pedagogy turned out to be a workable method for developing both individual and communal expertise and creating new knowledge along with new practices for enhancing school well-being. Overall the creation of individual and communal (or networked) expertise as well as the intervention for school well-being presume not only lateral thinking of the structure but also new kind of realization of teachers’ in-service training.