Promoting teachers’ professional wellbeing through an online course: An overview of the “Teaching to Be” European project

Teaching is recognized as one of the most stressful professions. Teachers experience negative feelings at work (e.g., stress, exhaustion, isolation), which have been increased due to the Covid-19 emergence. This highlights the need to address teachers’ wellbeing at work. The “Teaching to Be” project aims to examine and design a set of innovative training and professional development practices to promote teachers’ professional wellbeing and social-emotional competencies. It is an Erasmus+ KA3 project (2021-2024) co-funded by the European Commission, involving eight European Countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The novelties of the project are multiple. First, it intends to develop an innovative gamified online course for teachers’ wellbeing, which can help better understand and improve teachers’ professional wellbeing, as well as foster wellbeing in the school community. Second, the project integrates a quasiexperimental design with a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, which allows creating a course targeting teachers’ needs and examines whether their involvement in the development of the course contributes to higher professional wellbeing. The research is ongoing. Overall, 600 teachers from 40 schools have been participating in the PAR (Group A) and data collection is still in progress. In the 2022/2023 school year, another 1200 teachers will be involved in the project, divided into Group B (experimental group) and Group C (control group). All teachers will complete online questionnaires on wellbeing at the beginning and end of the school year. In the middle, Group A and B will follow the Online Wellbeing Course developed by the researchers. Teachers of Group A and B are expected to increase their professional wellbeing across the school year compared to Group C. Moreover, Group A should experience higher wellbeing levels thanks to their participation in PAR. Findings will allow improving national and international educational policies on teachers’ professional wellbeing.