Supporting teacher well-being in Iraq

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VII)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Beyond scripted lessons – exploring diverse social-emotional learning practices and research approaches

Proposal

In any crisis affected context, children experience, to varying degrees, distress, violence and trauma which often undermines their ability to cope, form relationships and function appropriately. Teachers—who often serve as role models in these situations—are key in providing care and support to children and help to address the impact a crisis has had on children’s learning. However, in emergency contexts, teachers, too, have been impacted by the crisis; their own well-being is often compromised such that they are unable to provide the focused support children need. To ensure teachers receive the support necessary to improve their own well-being, Save the Children has developed the Learning and Well-being in Emergencies (LWiE) Program, which provides teachers in crisis contexts with explicit training on social emotional learning in a package that is highly adaptable and can be quickly implemented. Specifically, this program trains teachers on the foundations of SEL, strategies for improving their own well-being, and supports teachers to understand that their well-being not only impacts the well-being of their students but can also affect learning outcomes. Save the Children recently piloted this teacher training package with Syrian teachers in several refugee camps in Iraq. This presentation will describe our approach to supporting teacher well-being by examining LWiE’s guiding principles and theory of change, as well as sharing our initial findings from the pilot to highlight the impact this training has had on teacher’s performance and overall sense of self.

Author

• Julia Finder Johna, Save the Children