An Intervention to Support Higher Education Teachers’ Teaching Processes and Wellbeing: Protocol for an Intervention Study Design (Preprint)

Abstract

Higher education teachers are experiencing numerous pressures in their work, such as increased workload, rising student numbers and declining job resources, making their wellbeing a crucial issue. Prior studies indicate that adopting a learning-focused approach to teaching correlates positively with higher education teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and positive emotions. Moreover, there is growing evidence that mindfulness-based interventions can enhance teachers’ wellbeing and teaching processes.

This article aims to describe the design of an intervention developed for higher education teachers to support their teaching processes and wellbeing. The aim of the intervention is to help teachers to reflect on their own teaching, offer tools to use learning-focused teaching methods and increase teachers’ ability to define the problem and use learning-focused teaching methods using guided reflection and mindfulness-based practices.

We developed an online intervention in which the teachers participate in four online group meetings and two individual online guided reflection sessions (before and after all the group meetings). Between the group meetings, the participants independently complete self-study assignments and mindfulness-based exercises available on the Moodle platform. In the guided reflection sessions, the teachers reflect on their previously video-recorded teaching situation together with a researcher. During the video-recorded teaching situation the teacher wears a smart ring measuring the teachers’ arousal level, and episodes with different arousal levels (high, low, changing) are presented to the participants in the guided reflection sessions. To examine the relations between higher education teachers’ teaching processes and wellbeing, and the intervention’s effects, we collect longitudinal data before and after the intervention with various methods (e.g., experience sampling, interviews, surveys).

The recruitment of the intervention participants took place in fall of 2024 from nine higher education institutions in Finland. Altogether, 56 teachers participated in the first part of the intervention (baseline measurement and guided reflection), and 37 participants completed the intervention in spring 2024 by participating in the second guided reflection session and data collection phase. In addition to these 37 participants, seven teachers who were not able to record their teaching in the second data collection phase but who has still participated in the group meeting and done mindfulness practices, were interviewed about their experiences. The data collection is still ongoing and additional data will be collected during the academic year 2024-2025.

This study aims to contribute valuable insights into the relations between higher education teachers’ teaching processes and wellbeing, and how an intervention consisting of guided reflection, group meetings, and mindfulness-based practices may enhance teachers’ awareness of how their teaching is related to wellbeing and ways to influence it.