About the Project

Promoting Teachers Wellbeing through Positive Behaviour Support in Early Childhood Education (ProW), is a policy experimentation project aiming to develop evidence-based policies and practices to enhance the teaching profession and elevate teachers’ careers and capacities in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings.

ProW is implemented by 11 organisations from Cyprus, Greece, Romania, and Portugal and seeks to put forward, test and formulate policies and mechanisms to empower and support teachers using Positive Psychology and School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) approaches. In doing so, it wishes to build an inclusive positive-oriented school culture in which all children are valued and respected.

Specifically, the project will develop alternative ways to enhance teachers’ motivation and take concrete steps to improve teachers’ competencies, wellbeing, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and reduce burnout levels. Moreover, it will impact policy efforts in the field to scale up and sustain positive behaviour frameworks in ECEC.

The project will also improve research knowledge on the effectiveness of Positive Psychology and the SWPBS on teacher’s professional and career development and take concrete steps for the establishment of the European Teacher Career and Wellbeing Observatory.

Objectives

  1. Enhance the attractiveness of the teaching profession, elevate teachers’ motivation, improve their wellbeing, job satisfaction and self-efficacy and reduce burnout levels.
  2. Build an inclusive positive-orientated school culture, in which all children are valued and respected.
  3. Enhance public authorities’ and ECEC settings’ capacity to support and empower teachers
  4. Improve the research knowledge on the effectiveness of Positive Psychology and the SWPBS on teachers’ professional development and teacher careers.
  5. Establish the European Teacher well-being and Career
    Observatory to conduct ongoing research and develop policies for teachers’ well-being and professional and career development.

Rationale

ProW represents a structured effort to explore and introduce comprehensive and evidence- based policies and practices to further the capacities of teachers working in ECEC and contribute to elevating the quality of education and care young children receive.

It has been developed in a bid to address the challenges educators in early childhood face. Evidence shows that teaching is one of the most stressful occupations resulting in high turnover numbers (20% of teachers abandon the sector in their first three years and 50% within five years). Moreover, research highlights that teachers’ wellbeing, resilience and efficacy are pivotal to ensure continuity, retention, and commitment to the teaching profession. It is also evident that if teachers feel burned out and overwhelmed, their students’ performance also suffers.

The project will explore, develop, and promote propositions to elevate teachers’ wellbeing in conjunction with their professional competencies. In that regard, ProW will build on and expand the scope of similar initiatives that predominantly focus on student wellbeing to support and empower teachers in their own right.

Methodology

ProW will carry out a policy experimentation that will entail a randomized wait-list controlled trial with the involvement of a minimum of 60 ECEC settings (15 schools from each of four countries – Cyprus, Greece, Romania and Portugal).

The experimentation will assess the impact of the intervention (a combination of PERMA & SWPBS), on early childhood teachers’ job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and wellbeing and on children’s outcomes.

Emphasis is placed on determining a cause-and-effect relationship between:

  • the training of teachers on the ProW framework (combined PERMA model and SWPBS framework) and their overall wellbeing;

  • the training of teachers on the ProW framework and children’s outcomes.