Why Teacher Wellbeing is Student Wellbeing
We tend to think of wellbeing as something that belongs to the individual. A student is happy or anxious. A teacher is enthusiastic or exhausted. We can recognise it, discuss it and implement strategies designed to improve it.
However, wellbeing is also something that can be caught – like a bug. Psychologists call this emotional contagion – the tendency for us to pick up the emotions of the people around us.
We see this in very simple ways. Smiles and laughter can be contagious, and recent research has found evidence that teachers and students mutually mimic each other's expressions of joy during lessons. In other words, engendering positive emotions is part of the interaction between people, rather than simply something experienced by an individual.
When a teacher walks into a lesson enthusiastic about what they are about to teach, students pick up on that enthusiasm. They become more interested and engaged. Often the lesson then goes well, and both the teacher and the students leave feeling even more positive.
The reverse can happen too. A teacher arrives tired and frustrated. The students sense it. The atmosphere changes. Engagement falls. Behaviour becomes more difficult. The teacher becomes even more frustrated. And so the classroom becomes a feedback loop.
A recent study of Positive Education in Austria found a systematic implementation of well-being did improve teachers' positive emotions and engagement, and the qualitative evidence also suggested positive changes in classroom atmosphere and student experience too. In that study, the quantitative data failed to show a significant knock-on effect on student wellbeing, but there are other studies that have.
The above paper, as well as many others, point to the same conclusion: if we want students to experience greater wellbeing, we should also focus on teacher wellbeing. A teacher who has autonomy, meaningful relationships, opportunities to use their strengths and a sense of accomplishment is likely to experience positive emotions in their work, or what is often described as ‘flow’. Those emotions then influence what happens in the classroom.
Of course, none of this means that teachers need to be happy all the time. And it certainly doesn't mean that teachers should fake positivity – research suggests that students respond better to genuinely experienced emotions and emotional displays. In addition, responsibility for student wellbeing should not be placed on individual teachers.
But the research shows something that we all intuitively know - the emotional experiences of the adults in a school matter. It also shows that wellbeing isn't something successful schools simply teach; it is something they cultivate as a community.
In the last ten years, work in the realm of Positive Psychology has moved beyond simply asking whether it is possible to improve wellbeing in schools. We now have a growing body of evidence showing which kinds of strategies make a difference, and how they can be implemented effectively.
All that good research raises a challenge for schools. And that is to deliberately create the conditions in which wellbeing becomes part of everyday school life and, in turn, spreads through the community.
Individual teachers can help too. As Dolly Parton used to say: “If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.”
Research: Wammerl & Lichtinger (2025), PERMA.teach: a study on the effectiveness of a standardized positive education training program in Austria; Frenzel, Daniels & Burić (2021), Teacher emotions in the classroom and their implications for students; Lu, Wei & Li (2025), Teacher's emotional contagion on students: Evidence from multi-method approaches; and the study of reciprocal joy transmission between teachers and students through facial mimicry in the classroom.
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