The “Smart Osvita” team met in Kyiv with representatives of the international organization Americares Foundation, Inc., whose support helped us implement a large-scale project on psychosocial support for Ukrainian educators this year.
“Our partners from Americares actively support Ukraine in various programs on health care, including mental health care. They were interested in our project “Psychosocial support for educators”, as the methods and tools we use in the training of school psychologists and teachers are evidence-based,” says Oksana Makarenko, head of the psychological department of NGO “Smart Osvita”.
The project covered all of Ukraine. Thanks to the support of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, school psychologists and teachers from all the oblasts of Ukraine could participate in the online training.
“Within the project we created three study programs: for teachers, for school psychologists who became certified trainers, and for university students. This is a thorough online course of 135 hours (4,5 ECTS credits) which was created together with the team of scholars from Ivan Franko Zhytomyr state University. It consists of seven study modules, contains a lot of practical tasks and progress tests, and a video course to review the knowledge and skills. Additionally, a co-author of the training program is a family and children’s psychologist Svitlana Royz,” says the head of the project Oksana Makarenko. “Our American partners supported us not only financially, but also provided a lot of useful materials and expertise when the course was being developed.”
In the period of February-June 2024, more than 80 school psychologists, 380 teachers and 22 students from the Department of Psychology learned in this module course how to identify mental disorders and provide psychological first aid to the participants of the academic process, including themselves. They learned to understand when there is a need to refer a child/teenager to receive more professional support.
Along with the training, the participants of the project took part in a survey. The academic supervisor of the project was Dr. Tara Powell, an associate professor at Illinois University (USA).
The researchers not only measured the psychological condition of the Ukrainian educators but also assessed the efficiency of the course created. The survey results will be analyzed in July-August and will become the foundation for an academic article in a specialized international journal.
This experience in psychological support in educational settings is unique. Americares partners were impressed by the approach, organization, and the number of high-quality materials that the project team managed to gather for one course.
“At our meeting we also discussed the perspectives for further cooperation and the format for interaction with participants of the educational process, taking into account the problems with power supply and limited access to the Internet. In future we also plan to create new psychosocial support projects for Ukrainian children and parents. We are open to cooperation, we have a lot of excellent ideas which we might offer to various donors. When we work together, we can do a lot of important and beneficial things for the future,” says the Head of NGO “Smart Osvita”, Halyna Tytysh.
Americares Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit organization that has been providing support for more than 40 years in the sphere of healthcare and welfare for people who suffer from war, natural disasters, poverty etc. all over the world.
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