In October, a round table discussion of the results of the research “Psycho-Emotional State and Readiness of Educators for Psychosocial Support” was conducted. The scale of the research was huge as it engaged about 3000 educators at different levels.
It is the result of joint work of Resilience.help psychological platform from “Smart Osvita,” scholars from Zhytomyr State University, and international partners: international organization “Americares” and associate professor of the University of Illinois, Dr. Tara Powell, a supervisor of the research. The project was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. It was a collaboration of governmental institutions, civil society, the academic community, and universities.
“The aim was to examine the psycho-emotional state of educators in the third year of the war, their ability (level of knowledge, skills, physical and psychological readiness) to provide psychosocial support to the participants of the educational process and to check the efficiency of the program training”Psychosocial support of educators”, says Tetiana Shyriaieva, PhD in Psychology, psychotherapist, member of Resilience.help team.
According to Tetiana Shyriaieva, the research was developed in the following way: from the school psychologists and teachers who agreed to participate in the research two representative groups were formed . The first one completed remote training and took part in the research, while the second was the control group and their task was only to complete the questionnaires, which were the research component.
Participants filled in 2 forms at the same time. The first was about the level of psychological condition. The second was about readiness (capability) to provide psychological support to the participants of the academic process. The research of the test group and the control group (for school psychologists and teachers alike) was done at three different times – at the beginning of the training, right after the end of the training, and one month after completing the training. Such an approach was supposed to show not only a total picture of the psycho-emotional condition of educators and how it changes over time it also allows measuring the efficiency of the training and the capacity of school psychologists and teachers to study online.
Participants simultaneously filled in two forms: it was designed to check their level of psychological state, another one measured readiness (capability) to provide psychological support to the participants of the educational process. The data of the test group and the control group (for school psychologists and teachers alike) was gathered at three different time spots – at the beginning of the training, right after the end of the training, and one month after completing the training. Such an approach was believed to demonstrate not only a picture of the psycho-emotional state of educators and how it changes over time, but it also allows measuring the efficiency of the training and the capacity of school psychologists and teachers to study online.
The total duration of the training for school psychologists in the «Psychosocial Support of Educators» Program was 135 hours (4.5 ECTS credits) and 60 hours (2 ECTS credits) for teachers.
In 2024, 61 school psychologists successfully completed the online training component of the project and received the Certificates of Trainers (there were also 20 educators who completed the training in 2023 during the program pilot stage). The next step was the task to conduct practical sessions of the training for almost 500 teachers who also received certificates of career enhancement. From now on, the certified trainers can conduct practical courses for teachers in their communities and, therefore, scale up the training.
«Our practical course is unique, as, being a component of this project, it was adapted to the education system and contains a big applied component. We did not simply take some evidence based foreign programs and implement them, we processed them and proved their efficiency scientifically while adding a creative component. Now our goal is to find a common solution to scale up the achieved results in the system of secondary education, higher education, postgraduate education, career enhancement,“ says Oksana Makarenko, co-founder of NGO «Smart Osvita», Head of the project «Psychosocial support of educators».
The efficiency of the practical part is proved by the results of the research, as stated by researchers from Zhytomyr Ivan Franko National University (ZNU) Natalia Portnytska, Olha Savychenko, and Iryna Tychyna. The main indicators of psycho-emotional state, highlighted by the researchers, were:
- emotional component of mental health;
- social component of mental health
- psychologic component of mental health
- professional burnout
- depression
- anxiety
- general level of stress perception;
- imaginary helplessness
- lack of self-efficacy
The team of project researchers from ZNU highlighted positive dynamics in the awareness of mental health issues and readiness for psychosocial support in the experimental group compared to the control group. This is confirmed by the results of the research showed in the screenshot:
Also, the researchers have observed the improvement in the psycho-emotional state of the teachers, for example, reduction of anxiety, depression, professional burnout, and stress levels, as well as improvement in the psychological, sociall, and emotional components of mental health at the stage during and after completion of the training:
Adam Keehn, Director of the complex emergencies NGO Americares, discussed expectations, possibilities of scaling up, and the implementation of the research results in other places that suffer from war.
“The research underlines the resilience of the Ukrainian people, especially educators, who continue doing their important work during this long and painful war. The research became an extremely important experience for all the participants, and it should be studied and scaled up to other regions that have also suffered from the war. We are hoping and expecting that this research and the practical experience of the adaptation of the lessons learned will help us better understand the needs of Ukrainian pedagogues and psychologists in order to create efficient programs for them. We are hoping that the results of the project will be beneficial in different aspects: to make managerial decisions to engage teachers in catering for psychological needs of the children, and could also be scaled up across the whole system of education,” said Adam Keehn.
Anastasia Holotenko, an expert of the Coordination center for mental health in the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Head of the Project Office on Psychology of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, discussed the change in the approaches to the organization of the psychological service in the system of education and the Ministry’s vision regarding partnership with the civil society sector to implement those changes.
“The change in the approaches to the work of psychological service in the Ukrainian system of education is long overdue. The priority project of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, implemented within the Ukrainian program of mental health “How are you?” initiated by the First Lady Olena Zelenska is aimed at the psychosocial and psychological support of all the participants of the educational process on all levels of education,” says Anastasiia Holotenko.
Anastasiia Holotenko adds that the Ministry’s project covers two components: adding mental health and psychosocial support domains to education and reviewing approaches to the work of the psychological service in the education system.
Liliia Hrynevych, vice-rector of Karazin University, former Minister of Science and Education of Ukraine (2016-2019) also joined the discussion. She mentioned the professional standard for the teachers that covers psychosocial competencies and also shared her feedback about the research.
“What we are seeing in this project is basically a model educational course for the development of the teachers’ competencies that are defined in the professional standard for the teachers: psychological, emotional-ethical and health protection. I am really impressed by the methodology used in the research and how everything has been arranged. We have a lot of different researches, but we lack the validity of this research, and I really like the presented study in terms of the toolkit, sample selection, control group research design, stages of the research that were used here, as we can see what impact this course could have on the target audience,” says Liliia Hrynevych.
Dr. Tara Powell, associate professor at the University of Illinois, supervised the research component of the project and discussed its methodology results and gave her feedback about her collaboration with the Ukrainian team.
“It is really difficult to conduct such researches in regions that suffered from the conflict. But I think the results of the research will have a long-term impact. We prepared a paper for an academic journal based on it, so that more people all over the world could read and get to know about the results”.
We detected significant improvements: teachers who participated in the program improved their readiness to provide psychosocial support, improved their knowledge, and also decreased stress, anxiety, burnout and depression levels much more, compared to the control group. The wellbeing of the participants also increased significantly,” says Tara Powell.
Victoriia Horbunova, Head of the EuroPsy National Committee, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, psychotherapist, introduced the adaptation and the implementation of the training. She has worked with Smart Osvita for some time and greatly invested in the development of the Resilience.help platform concept, helping to select evidence-based methods for the development of psychological programs, and she is one of the researchers who created the Mental Health Universal Training which was used as a foundation for the Program “Psychological support of educators”.
“We studied how universal the training is and how it is perceived by the first-line responders, those who are the gatekeepers to the system, the teachers. How this program could be adapted to the needs that the first-liners have, how new formats could be developed – this is what has been done: we adapted the program and developed an absolutely new format. We also researched how it could be scaled-up, what could be added to it, which modules could be created. If you look into the data, you will see that the educators are those experts who use this training, and they are the target audience of the mental health and adaptation training”, says Victoriia Horbunova.
The research results and recommendations will soon be available on Resilience.help platform. This platform was created specifically for educators, becoming a good place for the evidence-based practices that teachers can use to support the state of their own and their students’ mental health.
