When school leaders talk about what educators need, the conversation often starts with workload, time, staffing, and pay.
And rightly so. These are fundamental working conditions, and no amount of coaching can compensate for an unsustainable workload or inadequate resources.
But there is another part of the equation that deserves much more attention:
How do we support educators while they are doing the work?
A growing body of research points to coaching, mentoring, partnership, compassion, and meaningful professional support as powerful ways to strengthen educator wellbeing and, in turn, strengthen schools.
The evidence comes from very different contexts. It includes research from the United States, Ghana, Australia, Portugal, India, and the United Kingdom.
The studies do not all ask the same question, and they should not be treated as if they do. But together, they point toward an important idea: The quality of the relationship around an educator matters.
And when that relationship is built on trust, empathy, partnership, voice, and compassion, it can create the conditions for people to grow rather than simply cope.
What the evidence tells us
A three-year analysis of 694 schools across 33 U.S. school districts found that schools partnering with Upbeat experienced an average 1.7 percentage point increase in teacher retention over three years. That translated to approximately one additional teacher retained per school and an estimated $373,950 in savings per district. The research also identified leadership support, teacher voice, and work-life balance among the factors associated with retention.
When educators stay, schools retain relationships, institutional knowledge, and stability for students. When educators leave, schools absorb the cost of recruitment and onboarding, while students and colleagues experience the disruption that comes with turnover.
The pattern extends beyond the United States.
In Ghana, a cluster randomized trial involving 240 schools and 444 teachers found that a professional development program combining teacher training with in-classroom coaching reduced teacher burnout and turnover and improved several aspects of classroom quality during the intervention year (Wolf et al., 2019). A follow-up study by Wolf and Peele (2019) found that most of these gains faded after the program ended. The finding is important: coaching and professional support can make a meaningful difference, but sustaining that difference requires ongoing support rather than a one-time intervention.
In Australia, research involving 486 teachers across 39 elementary schools found a significant negative association between school-level teacher emotional exhaustion and student achievement. Schools with higher levels of teacher emotional exhaustion also had lower average student achievement in literacy and numeracy.
And in Portugal, a randomized controlled trial involving 155 public school teachers found that an eight-week Compassionate Mind Training program produced improvements in psychological and physiological wellbeing, with follow-up conducted three months later.
Different studies. Different interventions. Different education systems.
But they point toward the same broader principle: Educator wellbeing is not separate from school performance.
So why does coaching matter?
The numbers tell us that support matters, but the more interesting question is why.
What is it about effective coaching that makes a difference?
Three principles stand out.
1. People grow when they feel genuinely seen
More than six decades ago, psychologist Carl Rogers identified three conditions that he argued were central to constructive personal change: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy (Rogers, 1957).
These ideas remain remarkably relevant to educator coaching.
Congruence
Congruence means showing up as a genuine, present, and authentic person.
A coach does not need to perform certainty or pretend to have every answer.
In fact, acknowledging uncertainty can sometimes create more trust than projecting constant confidence.
When the coach shows up authentically, the educator gets permission to do the same.
That matters in education, where teachers and leaders can spend much of their working lives being observed, evaluated, assessed, or expected to have the answer.
Coaching can offer a place where educators do not have to perform.
Unconditional positive regard
Unconditional positive regard means accepting and valuing the person without making their worth dependent on performance.
Think about how much evaluation fills an educator’s day.
Observations.
Student data.
Parent feedback.
Performance conversations.
Assessments.
Standards.
Targets.
There is a place for accountability. But people also need spaces where they can reflect honestly without feeling that every conversation is another judgment of whether they are good enough.
That is one of the reasons coaching can be so powerful.
It creates protected space for reflection, growth, and honest conversation.
Recent work on educator wellbeing has similarly explored the importance of unconditional positive self-regard and the role it can play in professional identity and wellbeing (Tasler, 2025).
Empathy
Then there is empathy.
Empathy is not simply feeling sorry for someone. It is the ability to understand another person’s experience and communicate that understanding.
It also changes the way we listen.
Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment work places extraordinary emphasis on attention: giving another person enough uninterrupted attention to think clearly and deeply (Kline, 1999).
For educators, that can be surprisingly powerful.
Teachers spend their days listening to students.
Leaders spend their days listening to staff, parents, and other stakeholders.
A coach creates a space where the educator gets to be the one who is heard, and that is where the reflection and thinking begins.
2. Partnership creates ownership
Effective coaching is not about giving educators another expert telling them what to do.
One of the most influential approaches to instructional coaching, developed by Jim Knight, is built around seven partnership principles:
Equality. Choice. Voice. Dialogue. Reflection. Praxis. Reciprocity.
At the heart of the model is a simple idea: The educator is not the object of the coaching. They are the partner in it.
When people have genuine voice and choice in their professional growth, they are more likely to take ownership of the process.
The coach brings expertise, evidence, questions, and perspective.
The educator brings professional knowledge, experience, context, and agency.
Together, they decide what matters and what happens next.
This is fundamentally different from professional development that is delivered to educators.
It is development built with them.
And that difference can change everything.
3. Compassion is more than a nice idea
Compassion is sometimes treated as something that sounds good but is difficult to measure.
The research suggests otherwise.
The Portuguese randomized controlled trial of Compassionate Mind Training for teachers found improvements in several indicators of psychological and physiological wellbeing, including compassion, self-compassion, positive affect, and heart rate variability, alongside reductions in psychological distress.
Another 2024 study of 57 primary school staff examined self-compassion alongside physiological stress responses during the working day. The researchers found that self-compassion was strongly related to differences in heart rate variability between rest and high stress periods, suggesting that self-compassion may function as a resource in demanding work environments.
Compassion also matters at the leadership level.
Research on compassionate leadership in schools has examined how compassionate principals may influence teacher resilience, work engagement, psychological wellbeing, and job performance.
Compassion does not mean lowering expectations.
It means recognizing that people perform and grow differently when they feel respected, understood, and supported.
Compassion and accountability are not opposites.
In the right environment, they reinforce each other.
What this means for schools
Taken together, this evidence challenges the idea that educator wellbeing is an optional add-on to school improvement.
It is not.
The conditions in which educators work influence their capacity to engage, grow, collaborate, and stay.
And this is where coaching becomes particularly interesting.
Coaching can create a space where several important things happen at once:
Educators can reflect without being judged.
They can explore challenges without immediately having to defend themselves.
They can identify what matters to them.
They can make choices about their own development.
They can receive support while still being challenged.
And they can reconnect their daily work with their values and purpose.
Coaching is not a substitute for better systems
We should not use coaching to place the responsibility for wellbeing back on educators.
If a teacher has an unmanageable workload, coaching should not become a way of teaching them to tolerate it.
If a school is understaffed, no breathing exercise will fix the staffing problem.
If leadership practices are creating unnecessary stress, telling teachers to become more resilient misses the point.
Wellbeing is both individual and organizational.
Coaching can support the person.
But schools also need to examine the environment around that person.
Where HIVE fits
We created HIVE because educator wellbeing embedded in the school system is bigger than any single intervention.
H | Health
Energy, physical capacity, recovery, and the stress load educators carry into their work.
I | Identity & Inner World
Purpose, values, mindset, confidence, and the relationship people have with themselves and their professional identity.
V | Voice & Value
Feeling heard, respected, included, recognized, and valued. Having a genuine voice and meaningful choice.
E | Environment
The conditions in which people work: workload, leadership, systems, staffing, policies, relationships, and school culture.
Coaching can touch all four.
It can help an educator reconnect with their purpose.
It can create space to talk about stress and capacity.
It can strengthen voice and agency.
And it can surface the environmental conditions that may be helping or hindering wellbeing.
That last part is critical.
Because we cannot coach our way out of every organizational problem.
Sometimes the most important thing a coaching conversation can do is help someone name a problem that the organization needs to address.
The opportunity for schools
Schools are under enormous pressure to improve.
Student needs are changing.
Technology is changing.
Expectations are changing.
The work of educators is becoming more complex, not less.
The answer cannot simply be to ask educators to give more.
We need to create conditions that allow them to do their best work and sustain it over time.
That means thinking differently about professional development.
Differently about leadership.
Differently about accountability.
And differently about wellbeing.
Coaching will not solve every challenge facing schools.
But when it is built on authentic relationships, empathy, partnership, voice, and compassion, it can become much more than a professional development tool.
It can become part of the infrastructure of a healthy school.
Because ultimately, better schools are not built by asking depleted people to try harder.
They are built by creating the conditions in which educators have the capacity, support, agency, and trust to thrive.
When educators thrive, schools are stronger.
And that is where wellbeing coaching becomes not just a wellbeing strategy, but a school improvement strategy.
References
Baylis, L. (2026, January 27). How self-compassion can help school leaders stay grounded. Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.
Granziera, H., Martin, A. J., & Collie, R. J. (2023). Teacher well-being and student achievement: A multilevel analysis. Social Psychology of Education, 26, 279–291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-022-09751-1
Kline, N. (1999). Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. Cassell Illustrated.
Knight, J. (1999, April). The Partnership Principles. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada.
Knight, J. (2018). The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching. Corwin.
Maratos, F. A., Parente, F., Sahota, T. J., & Sheffield, D. (2024). Wellbeing and burnout in schoolteachers: The psychophysiological case for self-compassion. Current Psychology, 43, 37055–37069. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-07060-8
Matos, M., Albuquerque, I., Galhardo, A., Cunha, M., Pedroso Lima, M., Palmeira, L., Petrocchi, N., McEwan, K., Maratos, F. A., & Gilbert, P. (2022). Nurturing compassion in schools: A randomized controlled trial of the effectiveness of a Compassionate Mind Training program for teachers. PLOS ONE, 17(3), e0263480. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263480
Richard Marcel, I., & Kamalanabhan, T. J. (2025). Leading with compassion: An inquiry into compassionate leadership of school principals that impact teacher attitudes and job performance. Management and Labour Studies, 50(2), 257–288. https://doi.org/10.1177/0258042X241233887
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Shen, J., Lane, J., Reeves, P., Feng, S., & Ma, X. (2026). School renewal and school well-being: A case study. Education Sciences, 16(6), 978. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16060978
Tasler, N. (2025). Unconditional positive (self)-regard as a framework for educator wellbeing. In [book title]. Open Book Publishers.
Upbeat. (2025, April 14). What Drives Retention: A Three-Year Analysis of Teacher Engagement and Impact [Research brief]. Upbeat.
Wolf, S., Aber, J. L., Behrman, J. R., & Tsinigo, E. (2019). Experimental impacts of the “Quality Preschool for Ghana” interventions on teacher professional well-being, classroom quality, and children’s school readiness. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 12(1), 10–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2018.1517199.
Wolf, S., & Peele, M. E. (2019). Examining sustained impacts of two teacher professional development programs on professional well-being and classroom practices. Teaching and Teacher Education, 86, 102873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.07.003.