Innovation, Participation and Tutoring as Key-Leverages to Sustain Well-Being at School

Abstract

Background: Well-being at school is a recurrent hot topic within the educational field as a crucial issue for societies. Teachers often face tension with pupils and colleagues. Well-being is very often considered an individual achievement requiring individual measurement and support. This paper, in contrast, applies an approach that supports an ecological perspective of school well-being, implying a complex and multi-dimensional development investment. Methods: The paper investigates an innovative program initiative aimed at providing support to 50 Italian schools that have been deemed as critical for specific aspects (pupils’ levels of learning, discomfort among teachers, scarce innovativeness, etc.) through evaluative qualitative research. Results: This work sheds light on well-being as a dynamic construct created through an integrative effort in which many factors can play a role. These factors are the possibility of professional tutoring to help engage the school management and involve teachers in a bottom-up involvement, the development of creative initiatives and innovative projects to respond to context-based challenges and pupils’ needs, and the availability of space and time for collective sharing of ideas among teachers. These processes are closely related to the concept of well-being, which appears to be a systemic construct, rather than an issue related to the single individual. Conclusions: Focusing on the representation of schools’ managers and tutors involved in the program, this research illustrates the application of an ecological perspective that creates well-being through social and productive sustainability processes.