Teaching Happiness to Teachers - Development and Evaluation of a Training in Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

Teachers’ health is a persistent challenge for educational systems all over the world. Moreover, research results – especially in the domain of positive psychology – indicate that high levels of well-being are associated with additional benefits improving teachers’ professional performance. Therefore, a training to foster subjective well-being with one training day, two booster sessions, and exercises before, during, and after the meetings was developed. It consisted of about 10 h of face-to-face time and about 3 h for the exercises in total over a 5-week training period. Main contents were conditions and consequences of positive and negative emotions and well-being, emotion regulation, time management, savoring and gratitude and the application of positive psychological interventions (like Three Good Things). Analyses of planned contrasts by means of a waiting control group design with three measurement points (pre, post, and follow-up) showed a significantly higher increase for the training group (n = 42) than for the control group (n = 47) in the frequency of positive emotions, life satisfaction, and flourishing (interaction effects d = 0.44, d = 0.31, and d = 0.32) and a significantly stronger decrease in the frequency of negative emotions, perceived stress, and experiencing emotional exhaustion (interaction effects d = 0.69, d = 0.51, and d = 0.47) from pre to 1-month follow-up. Training effects were also visible up to 5 months, although no control group could be realized for this period due to the field approach.

The comprehensive inventory of thriving: a systematic review of published validation studies and a replication study

“…Furthermore, these studies have not adopted the entire CIT scale, but only a few subscales of the CIT. Instead, an extensive use of BIT is registered, both to measure well-being in cross-sectional study (e.g., Duan et al, 2018;Höfer et al, 2019;Ugwu et al, 2018) and to assess the effectiveness of welfare interventions, such as a therapeutic horticulture intervention with child survivors of sexual abuse (Watkins et al, 2019), a 9-week trauma and resilience curriculum with high school students (Judge, 2018), a single-session positive cognitive intervention as well as a character strength-based intervention with first-year university students , a fourteen-module video-recorded well-being intervention with undergraduate students (Singh & Bandyopadhyay, 2020), a group intervention for refugees and asylum seekers (Reebs et al, 2020), and a training to foster teachers' well-being (Rahm & Heise, 2019).…”

“…The well-being of clients/ patients should be evaluated pre-and post-treatment using comprehensive scales which are able to assess diverse well-being dimensions at once. We suggested to use the Brief Inventory of Thriving because (1) it assesses numerous dimensions of well-being (life satisfaction, optimism, positive emotion, belonging, support, self-worth, flow, accomplishment, meaning and purpose) using only 10 items; (2) its test-retest reliability has been demonstrated in different studies (e.g., Sorgente et al, 2018;Su et al, 2014); (3) it is commonly adopted to evaluate the efficacy of treatments (e.g., Judge, 2018;Rahm & Heise, 2019;Reebs et al, 2020;Singh & Bandyopadhyay, 2020;Watkins et al, 2019).…”

Positive Psychological Interventions for Teachers: a Randomised Placebo-Controlled Field Experiment Investigating the Effects of Workplace-Related Positive Activities

“…However, the effects of the PPIs that are especially designed for school teachers are largely unknown. Some previous studies indicated the advantageous effects of PPIs in promoting well-being and minimising teacher stress (Chan 2010(Chan , 2013McCullough 2015;Rahm and Heise 2019). However, the findings and their generalisability are limited due to the described shortcomings of the study and intervention designs.…”

“…A few studies have begun to highlight the potential value of PPIs for teachers (Chan 2010(Chan , 2013McCullough 2015;Rahm and Heise 2019). These studies have investigated the effects of standard strength-, savouring-, and gratitude-based interventions on teachers, which proved effective to some extent.…”

“…These studies have investigated the effects of standard strength-, savouring-, and gratitude-based interventions on teachers, which proved effective to some extent. However, the sample sizes were rather small (N < 100), and either longterm effects were not investigated (Chan 2010(Chan , 2013, or a control group was not included (McCullough 2015) or missing from the follow-up interval (Rahm and Heise 2019). Moreover, the studied activities neither focused on teachers and their occupational challenges nor contained a wider variety of activities to increase the person-activity fit.…”