Teacher burnout is a significant psychosocial, educational, organizational & economic challenge worldwide that has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Impacts have been reported on teachers’ occupational health/wellbeing, job satisfaction, and performance, as well as on the quality of the learning environments. Hence, contributions to prevent teacher burnout have been receiving more attention by policy makers globally, as investing in occupational health can have a return on investment of 5 times the investment, and teaching is becoming unattractive with many OECD countries facing a shortage of new teachers and high turnover rates. Yet, an emphasis has been placed on some individual-level variables (as optimism), leaving the impact of other individual (e.g., self-care) & contextual variables (as job resources, e.g., leadership practices) overlooked. This project intends to investigate teachers’ needs regarding personal & job resources and whether teachers’ and the leadership team’s perceptions of personal/job resources needs are concordant. It also investigates how personal and/or job resources relate with teachers’ occupational health/wellbeing. Lastly, it proposes to investigate how a digital platform based on a Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) approach for teachers and their leaders, can foster teacher wellbeing and performance. Study 1 employs a sequential explanatory design to assess the perceptions of teachers and leaders regarding personal and job resources. Participants will complete a survey, followed by focus group discussions with teachers and individual interviews with leaders to enrich the quantitative data. Study 2 adopts a quantitative design with teachers to examine the relationship between personal and job resources and teachers' occupational health and wellbeing. Study 3 involves developing and testing the #SELhub digital platform to promote a positive school culture and enhance teacher wellbeing and performance, through an experimental longitudinal design with pre- and post-tests.

Headlines worldwide are reporting on unprecedented levels of burnout, particularly for teachers, worsened by COVID-19. In Portugal, elementary-school teachers were mostly affected. This leads to teaching unattractiveness, teacher shortage and high turnover rates in many OECD countries, as Portugal. Due to its psychosocial, educational, organizational, & economic impacts, teacher occupational health/wellbeing becomes a major political and scientific challenge.

Based on the Conservation of Resources theory and the Job Demands-Resources Model, teachers with more personal (e.g., SEC, self-care) and job resources (e.g., social support) will be able to cope better with job demands and, thus, have greater wellbeing, whereas teacher burnout would stem from the absence of these resources. So, prior research stresses the importance of developing interventions to improve teachers’ resources. Although recent literature signals self-care practices as important personal resources to foster wellbeing, they tend to be overlooked. In turn, as teaching-specific stressors are mainly of a social- emotional nature, SEL interventions for teachers gained momentum with promising results in improving teachers’ SEC and wellbeing and decreasing their burnout.

Yet, SEL interventions are still scarce and developed mostly at an individual level. Contextual variables have a central role in SEL for teachers and theoretical models highlight these in the development of teacher SEC. Prior studies stress the relation between job resources (e.g., positive leadership, social support, organizational climate strength) and teacher SEC and occupational health/wellbeing. So, research should invest in the development of coordinated SEL interventions integrating individual, interpersonal and contextual variables.

The latter may be particularly relevant in the context of SEL, since becoming more social-emotionally competent is demanding and requires several factors beyond the intention to change, as it is an automatized behavior pattern. Thus, being part of an organization that prioritizes wellbeing and supports healthy behavior, may foster co-regulation and shared regulation toward behavior change, leading to increased wellbeing, job satisfaction, productivity, and reduced medical leaves and turnover.

Also, online interventions have been shown to be effective with diverse benefits (e.g., flexible, customized, cost-effective, engaging), which may help enhance teachers’ motivation and learning, without significantly increasing their job demands, and ease a nationwide reach.

This proposal is innovative as it fosters teachers often neglected personal (as self-care) and job resources, with a SEL approach & the aid of technological resources. It contributes by studying how SEL, self-care & positive leadership interact and may promote occupational health/wellbeing with a cutting-edge intervention.

The proposed investigation uses a mixed-methods design to explore personal and job factors affecting teacher burnout and how to enhance teacher occupational health/wellbeing and performance through a digital platform based on a Social-Emotional Learning approach for teachers and their leaders.

The research is structured into three interconnected studies.

Study 1 employs a sequential explanatory design to assess the perceptions of teachers and leaders regarding personal and job resources. Participants will complete the HEROCheck survey, followed by focus group discussions with teachers and individual interviews with leaders to enrich the quantitative data. Analytical methods will include exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as well as content analysis.

Study 2 adopts a quantitative design with teachers to examine the relationship between personal and job resources and teachers' occupational health and wellbeing, using SEM to test the structural relations in the proposed conceptual model.

Study 3 involves developing and testing the #SELhub digital platform to promote a positive school culture and enhance teacher wellbeing and performance. This study uses an experimental longitudinal design with pre- and post-tests, comparing an experimental group using the platform with alternative intervention and control groups. Multilevel modeling will analyze the data to evaluate the platform's impact on social-emotional behaviors, self-care practices, leadership practices, teacher wellbeing, and effectiveness.

#SELhub will enable a theoretical contribution linking SEL, self-care & positive leadership variables in a joint model to promote teacher occupational health with the aid of technological resources. With an expected medium to large effect size, it will foster a more social-emotionally competent workforce, increased social capital and better school climate. Promoting employees’ wellbeing, quality of working life & performance is a major scientific strategy area of BRU-ISCTE and #SELhub will contribute to fill a gap as a new resource with a pioneering integrated theoretical approach to study how SEL, self-care & positive leadership can contribute to improve teachers’ occupational health/wellbeing and performance.

#SELhub will help promote teacher occupational health and healthy workplaces (priorities of the 2030 Agenda & EU Action Framework on Mental Health/Wellbeing). It will be available for school communities to enrich their climate and culture strength and promote a more social and emotionally competent workforce. It will foster wellbeing, provide social benefits and opportunities for a healthy and positive environment for the whole school community, improved productivity and teacher effectiveness, which is expected to foster supportive and better-quality learning environments.

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Com o objetivo de aumentar a investigação direcionada para o cumprimento dos Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável para 2030 das Nações Unidas, é disponibilizada no Ciência-IUL a possibilidade de associação, quando aplicável, dos projetos científicos aos Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável. Estes são os Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável identificados para este projeto. Para uma informação detalhada dos Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável, clique aqui.