News

The third and final project partners' meeting took place in Sofia, Bulgaria on 8 June 2022. All partners were represented at the meeting.

The meeting focused on 3 main points:

• Achievements of each partner within project lifetime;

• Overall project progress and

• Activities to be implemented by the end of the project

The discussions were deep and fruitful and the partners took important decision for the successful finalization of the project implementation.

"Teacher Resilience" project started in March 2021 and has currently gone through its main phases: survey; toolkit development and piloting; promotion and distribution of the Toolkit.

The final conference on the project will be organized in August 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria. We expect over 50 local participants - teachers from all over the country, as well as representatives of the Ministry of Education and Science, who work closely with the Syndicate "Education" at Trade Union "Podkrepa" to deal with stress among teachers in Bulgaria. The event is open also for foreign participants - representatives of the project's partner organizations and stakeholders in the partner's countries.

The final conference on the project will take place on July 7, 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

You can request your participation by filling out the following registration form.

In our online survey we managed to engage nearly 800 teachers across all partner countries.

The primary data analysis allows making some key observation to shape the direction of our toolkit and also can serve as a compass for other initiatives in the field of teachers’ support.

These observations can be synthesised as follows:

• The main factors of stress for teachers are: numerous administrative formalities; the risk from COVID-19; low motivation of students; students’ behaviour and lack of support from parents.

• More than 1/3 of teachers report they feel physically and emotionally depleted in the end of the working day.

• More than half of teachers confirm they can handle with any difficult situation, relying on their self-confidence and support of other people.

The initial data shows strong resilience potential across teaching communities, which is a strong positive sign for the aptitude of education systems in coping with change.

Still, the overall exhaustion reported suggest for proposing concrete support measures for teachers to further foster their resilience. This will be the main emphasis in our forthcoming Toolkit.

The survey which is currently done by all project partners is one of the core basic research tools to work on contents for the Toolkit.

The first part of the questionnaire covers the topic stress management and seeks to find out which parts in the working and private life cause stress for educators; online classes / relationship to students, parents, management / changes e.g.in curriculum / salary / anxiety of COVID-19 / personal issues.

The second part aims at clarifying the personal flexibility – whether the participant is willing to cope and deal with changes, prefers challenges or if s/he tries to stick to long lasting routines without making a change.

The next part deals with job satisfaction – outsourcing factors on how, why and to what extend the person is motivated / exhausted / positive to do her/his job - since it would be senseless to work on practical strategies when the person is not willing to work in this subject anymore.

In the last step, the person is asked openly to name three stress factors experienced in the last 12 months. With this the interview is rounded up in a more personal manner which helps in creating a suitable strategy for managing largest burdens.

Lastly, some statistical data like age, gender, nationality, work dedication and duration of stay in the organisation is asked.

Concluding, the survey tries both to generalize components of stress in order to get an overall insight into the stress levels and in the last step to gain a personal overview in order to be able of outlining perfect personal strategies that fit to the person if needed.

The Toolkit will build upon results to develop and present practical activities and strategies to prevent burnout in our target population.

A study organised by the University Heidelberg looks into instructional resilience identifying key variables in how teaching staff at HE institutes coped emergency remote teaching during Covid19. Read more here (in ENG): https://osf.io/4p5td/

The first meeting of all the partners involved in this project took place in 13^th April 2021. During the meeting the partners had the chance to discuss their mutual work and the schedule of each concrete activity on the project.

The first step to start with is a survey. The survey is directed towards teachers to find out their stress level. It takes approximately seven minutes to answer and has already been sent out and answered by 800 people working in the education sector.

The survey seeks to outline the origins of the main stress factors either from a psychological or practical point of view. In outsourcing both factors, it should be able to elaborate suitable strategies for reducing the main stress levels.

If you also want to participate, please use this link:

https://kwiksurveys.com/s/NImIMRwr

Based on the results, we plan to develop our first product - the Teacher Resilience Toolkit.