I am revisiting my blog post on Instructional Coach for Wellness with this offering.

I was updating the standards section of my portfolio the other day when I remembered something interesting about the ISTE coaching standards. The standards are for K-12 instructional technology coaches. They have been updated over the years to the point that they really are pretty flexible, applicable, and accurate to the role, in my opinion. I am no longer a tech coach, but my takeaway is that the ISTE standards fit nicely in my role as a wellness coach in K-12 schools.

A Captain Obvious moment, yes, as the standards are all about coaching, but as I don’t know of any organization coming up with school wellness coaching standards, it seems like a good starting place for wellness coaches working with admin to design their job descriptions. I searched for wellness coaching standards to find companies that provide courses to gain certification, but their focus is mainly on life coaching/counseling for clients. I did not find any organization with information on wellness coaching in schools.

I can say from speaking with an international school recruiter that schools are, in fact, hiring wellness coaches.

I’ve written a great deal about this in this blog and through my Wellness@ES site. As I unpack what being an instructional coach for wellness might entail, I see a significant portion of it being connected to my vision of the school wellness program being integrated into the regular curriculum and school culture. I see the primary focus for wellness coaches to be similar to that of tech coaches, with the job being to coach the teachers to bring wellness principles into their regular classroom instruction. This can involve co-teaching, but the primary instruction is from the classroom or advisory teacher. The role also consists in designing professional learning opportunities for teachers.

A portion of this coaching involves lesson design and finding opportunities to highlight learning opportunities pulled from the wellness program. I previously shared the integration similarity between TPACK and my WPACK (Wellness-Pedagogy-Content Knowledge) approach that I bring to the collaboration table. For me, the WPACK descriptor helps paint the picture a bit more of how the character strengths and the PERMAH pillars of Positive Psychology can naturally fit into one’s teaching.

My bias and vision might not fit with what schools are doing as I suspect many are buying a SEL – wellness curriculum that the wellness coaches teach in each division. This, in my mind, looks like the old-style elementary guidance counselor rolling into classrooms periodically to conduct the prescribed lessons from the purchased curriculum. In middle and high schools, the wellness curriculum might be delivered through advisory by the advisory teachers, or possibly it is taught by the health/PE teachers during their classes. I don’t know the standard approach, especially in international schools.

My bottom line is that I am curious to learn how school leaders are finding ways to enhance their students’ wellness and, hopefully, their staff members. With international schools, I see this effort being extended to the greater community, including parents. If international schools are hiring wellness coaches, what do their job descriptions look like, and what standards are in place to guide them in fulfilling their job description? And, of course, how do they measure how successful their efforts are?

As I didn’t follow up in my original post to list the ISTE coaching standards and how they can fit a wellness coach, I will do so here.

4.1 Change Agent – The ISTE focus on improving instruction definitely means bringing about change in teaching and the classroom culture. I see the wellness coach also being a change agent, but to a lesser degree if one’s school follows the old model of the guidance counselor being “in charge” of wellness/SEL by providing the instruction and possibly not collaborating with elementary teachers and MS/HS advisory teachers. The WPACK model I mentioned previously has the wellness coach co-designing aspects of unit plans to integrate the character strengths and PERMAH via PRIME Integration Strategies into the units of study and culture of the classrooms. This approach leads to change, with classroom teachers leaders in wellness implementation efforts.

4.2 Connected Learner – ISTE tech coaches network through PLCs and PLNs to stay on top of innovations in pedagogy and technology. I see wellness coaches doing the same though the world of wellness coaching is relatively new compared to efforts to bring technology innovations into our schools. I wonder what networks of K-12 schools sharing information on Positive Psychology are out there. I am reaching out to Character Lab now to see if someone will speak to me about their network of schools if they have one.

4.3 Collaborator – This is the biggie! Like tech coaches, I see wellness coaches sitting at the collaboration table to find ways to naturally embed wellness learning opportunities into the regular LA, social studies, math, etc., curriculum. There are many possibilities for integration, as in how about some strength spotting characters in book studies? What was the “shadow side” of some strengths presented by some historical figures? When talking about scientific relationships and connections, how about connecting to the R in PERMAH to hook the interest of your students?

4.4 Learning Designer – Take what I just wrote for collaboration and add personalized to the ISTE call for student agency. Active learning to have your wellness coaches help co-design student-centered and constructivist lessons. The biggest draw for students to learn about wellness is that the main topic is themselves! What a connection and interest builder. Wellness from a PosPsych perspective is about learning, engaging, and practicing character strengths within the life domains of PERMAH. So once your program moves past the first stage of teaching the character strengths and domains,  you get to move into full-on experiential learning as students consistently practice and apply their knowledge in their lives. I am currently working with a Vietnam-based non-profit that provides educational services to students living in orphanages. We collaborate to design and teach a curriculum that hits this ISTE standard with students immersed in discovery learning activities. Note that the curriculum website is messy, with some translations and few graphics. It really is a workspace and “sandbox” for my Vietnamese partners to work with.

4.5 Professional Learning Facilitator – This standard is a differentiator between what conventional school counselors do and what a big part of an instructional coach for wellness does. This is not to say that guidance counselors do not provide professional learning opportunities. But I wonder how many counseling graduate school programs offer complete courses in instructional design and adult learning to teach counselors how to collaborate with classroom teachers to integrate the ASCA standards into the regular curriculum. This is where counseling and instructional technology intersect so well for the role of the wellness coach. I have mentioned in previous posts about the Geelong Grammar School’s approach to wellness program development in which the school goes through learning, living, teaching, and embedding the principles of PosPsych into the school’s culture. The first three stages involve adult learning first to learn and practice the principles to design ways to bring them into one’s teaching. This means lots of planning for personal and professional learning. As mentioned in previous posts, my approach would be to personalize and differentiate adult learning as much as possible. This involves the creation of a wellness resource website for adults to choose when, where and what they want to learn.

4.6 Data-Driven Decision-Maker –  Yes, of course, use data to drive your initial wellness program design efforts to guide your plan’s adaption throughout the implementation process. Where the technology coach is helping with academic achievement in which we have many assessment tools, we do not have many significant group ways to measure the well-being of the students and adults in our communities. There are some instruments out there, but this is an area where I have limited experience. And I can say that in listening to a couple leaders from Geelong Grammar School and the Institute of Positive Education a couple years ago, they didn’t have much information on assessment and general measurement either. Their Positive Education Enhanced Curriculum (PEEC) for early and primary students did not have any assessments, if my memory is correct, from reading through it a year and a half ago. But perhaps they have a measurement component now. My point isn’t to point fingers but to say that they are natural leaders in wellness education, and they were very upfront about how difficult it is to measure well-being in children. I get excited at the possibility of working with MS/HS students and adults to design a personal wellness inventory based on the idea of everyone having a wellness plan. This inventory could look similar to the program with the PERMAH construct and how one rate the use of specific character strength applications within each pillar. Working to do the same with elementary students could be challenging. Still, the more effective we are in teaching the character strengths and the pillars, the more the students will use wellness vocabulary in their language to the point of being able to self-evaluate their well-being to some degree. The struggle with all age groups is trying to construct a pre-assessment of one’s well-being when the students don’t have a language yet to describe their well-being. The folks at Character Lab offer a Student Thriving Index, and Dr. Duckworth has a grit scale.

4.7 Digital Citizen Advocate – I show my age and time in the tech field when I say we need to stop saying “digital” citizenship. It is just “citizenship,” as our students live in the analog and digital world with the fluency of movement, so they are one world. Moving on… the wellness coach’s prime directive is to help students with their personal development to build out their wellness toolkits to thrive in their lives. So yes, this also means helping them become good citizens. My take on digital citizenship efforts is that much of the focus is on assisting students in seeing how their actions affect others. Many character strengths and PERMAH pillars come into play to help students make healthy decisions when interacting with others. I also see the need for an internal focus to help students and adults learn about how they can engage their strengths within the PERMAH pillars to positively affect their digital wellness.

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