99 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Elementary School Teachers: A Qualitative study INTRODUCTION In the past decades, teachers reported increasing work pressure and stress (de Carvalho et al., 2021). The work requirements are high but also emotionally demanding (Blomberg & Knight, 2015, Jennings et al., 2017). Research shows that elementary school teachers report increasing absenteeism and a higher percentage of burnout symptoms compared to teachers in secondary schools or higher education and compared to people in other professions (Statistics Netherlands, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022, Algemene Onderwijs Bond, 2020). For more than half of the elementary school teachers (i.e. 56%) in the Netherlands, the work load is even experienced as unacceptably high (Grinsven et al., 2016), resulting in drop-out and burn-out symptoms (e.g., Jennings and Greenberg, 2009). Increased stress levels are associated with teachers’ lower health, well-being and performance (de Carvalho, 2021). In order to reduce teachers’ stress levels, interventions aimed at teachers’ social and emotional competencies are needed (de Carvalho, 2021). A proposed method that focuses on strengthening these competencies is mindfulness training. Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) aim to enhance one’s capacity to pay attention to experiences in the present moment (Kabat-Zinn, 2013). Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has been developed to improve emotion and attention regulation in order to reduce perceived stress. Different studies have shown that MBIs can reduce experienced stress, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and improve quality of life (e.g. Khoury et al., 2015; Goldberg et al., 2018). The number of studies exploring the effects of MBIs on stress reduction in school teachers have increased over the past few years (Jennings, 2017). However, these are often small quantitative non-registered studies within the United States (US) education system or outside Europe with mixed teacher populations or (preservice) teachers from kindergarten to grade 12, teaching pupils aged 5 to 18, which is different from the majority of the European educational systems. Elementary school teachers in Europe basically teach children aged 4 to 12, except for Scandinavia where pupils at the age of 16 leave elementary school. Moreover, elementary school teachers – in contrast to teachers in secondary or higher education - teach the same group of pupils for five days a week, which may lead to a stronger connection between teacher and pupil, and in turn make teachers more emotionally involved in their teaching (Statistics Netherlands, 2020). It can thus be expected that MBSR may have stronger effects in elementary schools, as a small change in the teacher may have a greater impact on the quality of the classroom climate and in turn on pupils, compared to teachers who see their pupils less often as in secondary and higher education. The effects of MBSR in European elementary schools could therefore differ from the effects in a mixed, K-12, secondary or high school teacher population. As a result, effects found so far cannot be generalized across countries and school levels (Roesser, 2022). Research specifically focused on European elementary school teachers is rather needed. 6
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw