Student Teacher Well-Being: Deepening Understanding and Building Support (STeWDUBS)

Well-being is increasingly identified as an important issue relating to student welfare in higher education. This is true of initial teacher education as much as it is of other educational sub-sectors, particularly given the additional stresses and multiple agencies involved. An initial needs analysis demonstrates that the key factors which appear to influence student teachers’ well-being are:

– the difficulty of managing the academic and school placement workload (Schmidt et al., 2017; Teachers’ Analysis Compendium, 2017), and a new professional identity (Pillen, Beijaard and den Brok, 2013),
– a decline in well-being during the second school experience placement,
– a growing awareness that when trainees reported their well-being as ‘high’, relationships had been strong; where their reported well-being was ‘low’, relationships were weak or new.
By creating and maturing an aspect of training which focuses on the development of communities, interpersonal skills, and supporting the development of strong relationships, we aim to develop Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes which draw on best practice from across contrasting European contexts to better support student teachers’ well-being.

Given the focus of the project, which spans across both university and school contexts in relation to the issues identified above, it is crucial that it engages with all core groups involved in the process of initial teacher education, student teachers, teacher educators and school-based mentors. These are the identified groups which will engage with the objectives of the project to understand in more detail the complexities and processes involved in student teacher well-being and how these can be used as the basis for the creation of three toolkits, one for each of the three groups involved in the project.

The dynamics of well-being issues will differ in each national context, and by working transnationally, any outcomes will have greater utility across a wider community of those involved in ITE. By uncovering and understanding the processes and issues relevant across national systems, the toolkits which are developed as the main intellectual output of the project will have greater utility across the European zone.