Reducing Teacher Stress and Building a More Effective School Culture

描述（由申请人提供）：教师的心理健康和学校文化是预防青少年问题和确保青少年成功发展的重要因素，但在很大程度上被忽视了。职业倦怠和抑郁在教师中很常见。它们会影响教师留在该领域的可能性，并削弱教师的有效性。在缺乏共同价值观、合作和关爱的学校里，教师的职业倦怠程度更高，这是导致行为管理无效、教师流失率高、教学质量低和强制行为等问题的重要因素。然而，尽管教师个人的心理健康和大学学校文化很重要，但改善学校这些方面的策略研究却严重有限。减轻教师压力和创建有效的学校组织的一个有希望的候选人包括以接受为中心的干预。这种方法减少了对人类服务机构客户的抑郁和倦怠以及污名化态度。它促进了以证据为基础的实践的采用，并增加了幼儿园的合作和支持。到目前为止，还没有人在公立学校测试过这种方法的价值。我们建议对一项以接纳为中心的干预措施进行实验评估，以减少中学教师的困扰并增加学校教师的合作关系。我们打算随机分配48所正在实施积极行为支持（PBS）的俄勒冈中学接受或不接受干预。我们期望教师的心理灵活性和幸福感、学校合作、积极行为支持实践的使用以及学生的受害程度会随着干预而改善。我们将检查这些结果，以及与我们的次要目标相关的结果：检查干预是否对更远的学生结果（异常同伴形成、心理健康、行为结果和学习成绩）有积极影响。将审查干预效果的潜在调节因素，例如干预前的经验回避水平、学院关系、性别、学校类型和工作人员的种族/民族。我们还将测试对干预的反应变化是否介导干预条件与员工结果之间的关联。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Teachers' psychological wellbeing and school culture are important, but largely overlooked, factors in efforts to prevent adolescent problems and ensure young people's successful development. Burnout and depression are common among teachers. They affect the likelihood teachers will stay in the field and undermine teacher effectiveness. Teachers in schools that lack shared values, cooperation, and caring experience higher levels of burnout, which is a significant contributor to problems, including ineffective behavior management, high teacher turnover, low quality instruction, and coercive behavior. Yet, despite the importance of individual teacher's psychological wellbeing and a collegial school culture, research on strategies for improving these aspects of schools is seriously limited. One promising candidate for reducing teacher stress and creating effective school organizations consists of acceptance-focused interventions. This approach has led to a reduction in depression and burnout and stigmatizing attitudes toward clients of human service organizations. It has fostered adoption of evidence- based practices, and increased cooperation and support in preschools. To date no one has tested the value of this approach in public schools. We propose to conduct an experimental evaluation of an acceptance-focused intervention for reducing teacher distress and increasing school collegiality among middle school teachers. We intend to assign randomly 48 Oregon Middle schools, which are implementing Positive Behavior Support (PBS), to receive or not receive the intervention. We expect that teachers' psychological flexibility and wellbeing, school collegiality, use of positive behavior support practices, and the level of victimization among students will improve with the intervention. We will examine these outcomes in addition to results related to our secondary aim: an examination of whether the intervention has positive impact on more distal student outcomes of deviant peer formation, psychological wellbeing, behavioral outcomes, and academic performance. Potential moderators of intervention effects, such as pre-intervention levels of experiential avoidance, collegial relations, gender, school type and race/ethnicity of the staff will be examined. We will also test whether changes in response to the intervention mediate the association between the intervention condition and staff outcomes.