Healthy Teachers and Professionals in Education – Institut für Lern-Innovation

The alarmingly high rates of early retirements of teachers due to health reasons since the 1990s has attracted the attention of European research and politics to the potentially negative, unhealthy consequences of teachers' work. Psychosocial and work-related stress, psychovegetative disorders, burnout syndrome, workplace bullying, absenteeism and early retirements seem to be widespread and dramatically increasing phenomena across Europe. They evoke not only individual suffering and breakdown but also enormous costs for public funds and health services due to sickness rates, therapies and early retirements. Furthermore the emotional exhaustion of teachers of course affects the quality of teaching and has negative consequences for pupils and students.

Against this background it is of high relevance to train prospective and already working teachers with the aim to improve their professional handling of resources and to optimise their competences of coping with job-related stress.

Specific internet-based training offers adapted to the conditions of the teaching profession and focused on coping with stress and management of resources are highly desirable. So far professional support is particularly given by psychotherapists, coaches and counseling centres. But these professional groups act only after a severe dysfunction exists.

There is an urgent need for preventive solutions, easily accessible for the target group, training and supporting the job-related coping competences, helping to reflect inappropriate thinking and acting patterns and to change them step by step.

The main aim of this project application is therefore to develop and implement an internet based interactive and appealing training programme that supports teachers to develop higher sensitivity towards the handling of their resources, to reflect their strategies, to become acquainted with alternative ways of acting and to establish them as far as possible by replacing unfavorable patterns.