Leadership That Nourishes: A Review of the 'Leadership for Teacher Flourishing' Model

Every once in a while, something you read stays with you longer than expected—not because it’s revolutionary, but because it resonates deeply with what you’ve felt in your heart for years.

That’s how I felt while reading The Development of a New Model of Educational Leadership: Leadership for Teacher Flourishing [1].

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In times when there is a huge focus on performance management and student outcomes, this article proposes something different, advocating that the primary role of school leaders isn’t just to improve performance, drive innovation, or manage systems—but to help teachers flourish. Not just function or thrive in the traditional sense, but flourish.

‘Teacher flourishing’ here perhaps refers to a state of being in which teachers experience both personal and professional well-being, a sense of fulfillment, and growth in a nurturing, supportive school environment. It goes beyond mere job satisfaction or the absence of stress. Instead, it encompasses a deeper, more holistic experience of thriving, professionally, emotionally, and socially. A sense of being respected and appreciated for not only their work but also for who they are.

It’s a word we probably don’t use enough in leadership discussions. And yet, after years of seeing talented teachers burn out, disengage, and hop jobs frequently, it feels not just appropriate but essential.

So let’s see what makes this model different from so many other models out there. Here is a short review.

The model, drawn from research across 78 British schools using both quantitative and qualitative methods, puts forward a leadership philosophy that is not centered on test scores or end-of-year appraisals but on teacher well-being as a precondition for all the other objectives. It identifies four interconnected factors that contribute to teacher flourishing:

• Positive, trusting relationships

• Opportunities for professional growth

• A sense of meaning and purpose at work

• Positive subjective well-being

At first glance, these might sound like common sense. But in the landscape of existing leadership models—instructional, distributed, transformational, etc.—what's striking is how few explicitly name these outcomes as leadership goals.

Most models still lean heavily toward student outcomes, school vision and mission, and prized university enrollments. This model, which the authors call Leadership for Teacher Flourishing (LFTF), flips the lens on a different, often ignored but crucial factor. No, it doesn’t ignore performance, which remains crucial, but it argues that performance results from a focus on teacher well-being and not the other way around.

So why does it matter, especially in international schools? I think if there’s any setting where LFTF feels urgently needed, it’s in international schools where attrition rates are a matter of concern, and leadership often struggles to understand and address the deeper reasons why teachers leave.

Teaching, let’s admit it, is emotionally and physically taxing work in today's age and times. Globally, educators report higher levels of stress, lower physical health, and elevated burnout risks. These aren’t just statistics; they’re lived realities that I’ve seen play out in staff rooms, one-to-one interactions, and sudden, abrupt resignation emails, sometimes not out of anger but mental and physical exhaustion. Talk to any teacher in international schools, and you will often hear a refrain ‘there is too much work.'

This model meets that reality head-on. It says: if teachers are feeling demotivated and exhausted, it is not because they are incompetent but because the system fails to nourish them, then maybe it’s time to change the system.

The paper advocates for leadership in schools to be reimagined as service and shared ownership. What stayed with me from the article is the concept of loving collective inquiry, a participatory, collaborative approach where teachers are empowered to design the very strategies meant to support their well-being.

There’s a humility in that and a profound respect for teachers and their work. It recognizes teachers not as recipients of top-down support but as co-creators of a culture where everyone, regardless of role or title, has the capacity to help others flourish.

This isn’t about formal leadership structures. It’s about a culture where love isn’t an ideal but a real commitment to listening, to appreciating, to empowering, and to showing compassion and integrity, especially when things get hard.

Yes, love. The authors define it clearly—not as sentimentality, but as the sustained effort to create environments where individuals and school communities can flourish together. And perhaps that’s the missing word in much of our leadership discourse.

There are many lessons for international schools in this article. As someone who has led teams in both national and international settings, I see immense promise in this model not just as a philosophy, but as a practical, humane response to what schools are truly grappling with: burnouts, high rates of attrition, and, to put it simply, a loss of joy we as teachers once felt when such pressures did not exist.

What the LFTF model offers is not a silver bullet, but a shift in starting point. Instead of asking, “How do we improve performance?” it asks, “What do teachers need in order to feel whole and purposeful in their work?” And from there, everything follows. It is perhaps a reorientation to achieve the same objective, albeit through a different, more enjoyable route. It is a change of mindset. 

It is clear that there is a strong case for it, both ethically and strategically. Teachers who flourish don’t just stay—they contribute more, support each other more, and model the very values we want students to absorb. In today’s challenging school environments, this isn’t a luxury; it’s a lifeline.

If leadership is ultimately about impact, then perhaps the most profound impact we can make isn’t in a strategic plan or a powerful vision/mission but in how we make people feel seen, heard, valued, and supported. This sentiment has been beautifully captured by Maya Angelou in a sentence I often quote:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Truly speaking, the Leadership for Teacher Flourishing model doesn’t discard what came before; it simply adds what has long been missing: the human core of leadership. It reminds us that flourishing isn’t a by-product; it’s the point.

And if we can lead with that at the center of a school's culture, then maybe we'll see not only teachers but the whole school community flourishing.

Reference

[1] Granville-Chapman, Katy & Lee, Matthew & Ritchie-Dunham, James. (2024). The Development of a New Model of Educational Leadership: Leadership for Teacher Flourishing. Humanistic Management Journal. 9. 1-21. 10.1007/s41463-024-00181-z.

Purshottam Vashist