Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Teachers’ promotion of mental health: Results from a European intervention program (PROMEHS)
Maria Poulou, Carmel Cefai, Liberato Camilleri, Paul Bartolo, Alessia Agliati
ABSTRACT:
Recent research on Social and Emotional learning acknowledges the importance of in-service teachers’ mental health and well- being in order to promote students’ mental health. Based on this axiom, seven European countries (Croatia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Romania and Portugal) developed the PROMEHS project (Promoting Mental Health at Schools) to promote both students’ and in-service teachers’ mental health. The project employed a quasi-experimental design, collecting data at the pre-and post-test phases of the implementation. Current paper aims to describe the results of PROMEHS implementation to Greek in-service teachers. In-service teachers from preschool to secondary education (1648 pre-test and 1127 post-test), equally divided into experimental and control groups, completed the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy (short form), the Connor Davidson Resilience (CD 10), and the Social and Emotional Competence of Teachers (SECTRS). The experimental group received 16 hours of training to implement the mental health curriculum in their classroom with information about their own mental health. Results revealed significant improvement of the experimental group comparing to the control group in teachers’ self-efficacy, resilience and social and emotional skills. Implications of the study are discussed in terms of teacher preparation programs and teacher professional development.
keywords: in-service teachers, resilience, self-efficacy, social and emotional competence, Greece .