Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE): Strengthening teacher well-being and classroom climate

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Educator well-being as a foundation for peace in a divided world

Proposal

Teachers face high levels of stress that can erode their health, undermine classroom management, and weaken the quality of their relationships with students. These challenges not only affect learning outcomes but also reduce schools’ capacity to foster cooperation and inclusion in contexts often marked by division. Supporting the well-being and social and emotional competence of educators is therefore central to creating school environments where empathy and positive relationships can flourish.
The CARE program—Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education—was developed to address these needs through an evidence-based professional development course for teachers. CARE integrates training in mindfulness, emotion skills, and compassion with strategies for classroom management and stress reduction. Its approach is grounded in the Prosocial Classroom model, which emphasizes that teacher well-being and social-emotional competence are key drivers of classroom climate and student development.
Across multiple randomized controlled trials, CARE has been shown to improve teachers’ emotion regulation, efficacy, and well-being, while reducing stress and burnout. These outcomes translate into healthier classroom environments that support student engagement and learning. Importantly, CARE’s design emphasizes sustained practice and reflection, giving teachers opportunities to integrate social and emotional skills into both their personal lives and professional practice.
This presentation will share evidence from CARE’s evaluations and discuss how its design principles can be adapted across diverse educational settings. In doing so, it will highlight how strengthening educators’ internal capacities can ripple outward to students and schools. By cultivating awareness, resilience, and compassion in teachers, CARE demonstrates how professional development can do more than improve instruction: it can contribute to building classrooms that model empathy and cooperation, and in turn, help schools become sites of peacebuilding in a divided world.

Author

• Mark T Greenberg, Penn State Univ