Improving University teachers’ skills and psychological health through ACT Francisco Montesinos, Spain

University context provides difficult situations in which teachers have to deal with their own barriers in order to develop effective teaching interventions. Risk of burnout has been found in University teachers (Lackritz, 2005; Ponce, 2005; Guerrero, 2009). ACT and Psychological Flexibility has been shown to be useful for workers (Bond y Flaxman, 2006) and health professionals (Hayes y Strosahl, 2004; Dahl, Wilson, Luciano y Hayes, 2005) ACT based training has been useful with health professionals to improve skills for coping with difficult situations with patients, identifying avoidance behaviors and learning new emotion management strategies.

Design Preliminary study Pre-experimental design with one group with pre-test and post-test. Hypothesis: an ACT-based intervention can contribute to reduce interference of psychological barriers, increase frequency of teachers’ interventions coherent with their goals and values and improve their psychological health.

Participants 29 UEM teachers showed interest 19 participants Age: M = 39.9 SD = 7.05

Participants Teaching area

Measures Individual interview – identification of difficult situations, barriers and usual reactions Subjective scales of intensity and interference of barriers (1-10) Questionnaires – Maslach Burnout Inventory MBI (Maslach & Jackson, 1986) – Acceptance an Action Questionnaire AAQ-II (Bond et al., in press) – Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills KIMS (Baer & Smith, 2004) Open questions related to what they have learned

How we did it Course: “Emotions management in teaching context”. Training credits were available for teachers. UEM teachers showed great interest for this course, found it very different from other training offers, and appreciated this opportunity to face psychological issues and to share their problems and worries in their teaching area.

Intervention protocol Session 1 (4 hours)  Creative hopelessness: Identifying difficult situations, psychological barriers and short term and long term consequences for ineffective behaviors in teaching context.  Control is the problem, not the solution. Polygraph metaphor (Wilson & Luciano, 2002, p. 85). “¿What’s your mother’s name?” Exercise (Wilson & Luciano, 2002, p. 143)  Values clarification. Gardening metaphor (Wilson y Luciano, 2002, p. 113). Funeral exercise (Wilson y Luciano, 2002, p. 153). Differentiating between values, goals, actions and barriers. Making a commitment. “Crossing the river” metaphor. Session 2 (4 hours)  Evaluating commitments and actions  Pros and cons of human language. “Relate anything to anything else” Exercise (Hayes & Smith, 2005, p. 19). “What are the numbers?” exercise (Wilson & Luciano, 2002, p. 143). Examples to discriminate how verbal contents depend on our experience and how verbal relations are additive and arbitrary.  Psychological acceptance.  “Being willingly Out of Breath” Exercise (Hayes & Smith, 2005, p. 49).  “Opening the closet and straightening up” metaphor. Observing internal experience flowing exercise (Wilson & Luciano, 2002, p. 216, 230): exposure to emotions and thoughts: past and future situations  Invitation to practice acceptance

Results (I) Situations that more frequently involved distress Behavior problems, disrespectful behaviors in students Lack of interest, no attention Disagreement with marks and demands for higher grades Inadequate expression of complaints by students Lack of understanding by students Teacher having to speak in public Teacher not knowing how to respond Teacher errors

Results (II) More frequent barriers Insecurity Anger Nervousness Indignation Annoyance Frustration Lack of motivation Blocked Blame Anxiousness Disappointment Weakness

Results (III) Intensity of barriers 1 week

Resultados (IV) Interference of barriers

Improved skills (qualitative analysis) Results (V) Increasing consciousness of emotions “stop and listen to my body”, “listen to the emotions and identify them”, “identifying my emotions and be conscious of how they can influence my behavior with the students” Developing acceptance and increasing tolerance to distress “not everything is always under our control”, “let me feel the emotion and not block it”, “get close to the emotions from another place” Maintaining a valuable direction “think about what I’m going to find along this path and make space for these emotions in order to achieve my goal”, “think about where I want to go and not lose the way that leads us to our objectives y values”

Conclusions (I) This study reminds us that emotions make part of the teaching context, and that it can be useful for teachers to have skills to manage their own barriers and even take advantage of barriers to enrich the teaching experience. Teachers reclaim and consider useful better training related to competences that help them to manage their own emotions in the classroom.

Conclusions (II) An ACT-based intervention contributed to increase acceptance skills in university teachers. Qualitative data points out that they improved their skills and intensity and interference of barriers decreased in most participants. Further investigation is needed with more experimental control, broader samples and a longer follow-up period, and more precise measures which help us to identify involved processes of change.

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