Annotation
The course is focused on the professional demands and incidence of stress in teaching. Teaching as a helping profession shows a high level of stress and stress, which can lead to burnout syndrome with long-term severe exposure. Learning outcomes of the course unit The aim of the course is to acquaint students with stressors present in teaching, with professional demands and dilemmas and with possibilities of their successful coping and solving at the level of individuals, schools and departments. Students will be offered both theoretical and empirical knowledge of teacher stress and burnout, as well as opportunities to identify their own weaknesses in coping with professional demands and to practice effective strategies.
The course consists of 5-6 meetings, which will be devoted equally to the presented three blocks. For each meeting, students will be assigned a professional reading and a practical task through the Moodle platform. The theoretical and empirical knowledge of the topic will be systematized at the meeting and practical tasks presented and discussed in particular.
The course covers three basic blocks: 1. Stress and sources of stress in teaching - The first block will characterize stress and describe its manifestations. Stress is grasped by Hobfoll's conservation theory and is defined by disrupting the body's balance. This concept will be compared with other approaches.
In the first block, attention will also be paid to the classification of the causes of teacher and general work stress, which arise from Czech and foreign research. In addition to generalizing classifications, the individual nature of stressors will be shown. Students will map their own workload through self-diagnostic techniques.
The outcome of the first block will be the presentation of burnout syndrome .; 2. Stress Management - The second block will introduce stress management strategies, or coping strategies, by which the individual responds to the stress present and seeks to restore the body's balance. Students will be acquainted with various typologies of coping strategies and empirical research that mapped the used strategies of coping with teacher stress. Coping strategies will be differentiated with respect to whether they lead to the successful management of stress in the long term, ie reducing its overall rate. Using existing questionnaires and other self-reflecting methods, students will be encouraged to map personally preferred coping strategies; 3. Burnout prevention - The third block will present a comprehensive system of teacher burnout prevention, which includes activities at the level of individuals, at the level of teachers and schools and at the level of the school system. Attention will also be paid to possible interventions in cases where burnout has already occurred.