About this episode

Dr. Laurie Santos discusses misconceptions about happiness and shares evidence-based tools to improve teacher well-being.

Teaching is hard (often draining) work, and educators’ instincts about what will bring relief are frequently wrong—just as they are for most people. That’s because our minds deceive us, says cognitive scientist and Yale professor Laurie Santos, one of the world’s leading researchers on well-being and happiness. “One of the most annoying features of the mind is the fact that we all have these intuitions about the kinds of things we should be doing to feel better. But the research shows that many of those intuitions are just incorrect.” In this episode of School of Practice, Dr. Santos joins host Kristin Leong to debunk some of the most popular and persistent myths about happiness—more money *mostly* doesn’t buy more happiness, for example, and a values mismatch at work may be more consequential for burnout than you think—and shares a set of evidence-based tools teachers can begin to apply right away to reclaim a sense of balance. Related resources: Learn more about this episode The Research on Protecting Teacher Well-Being Coursera: The Science of Well-Being The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Yale’s Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students What a New…

People in this episode

Host: Kristin Leong

Guest: Laurie Santos

Topics covered

• teacher well-being
• happiness
• cognitive science
• burnout
• evidence-based tools

Keywords

• teacher well-being
• happiness
• burnout
• cognitive science
• evidence-based tools

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Yale, Coursera, Edutopia

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