Podium Presentation - 10 minutes International Positive Psychology Association 7th IPPA World Congress 2021

Enhancing School–University Pre-Service Teacher Professional Experience With Online Wellbeing Masterclasses during COVID-19 (#71)

Mathew White 1 , Faye McCallum 1
  1. The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, Australia

Over the past 10 years, the topics of character, resilience and wellbeing in education have drawn attention by school leaders, teachers and policymakers. However, there is a gap between the developments in schools and how initial teacher education at universities have responded to wellbeing developments. The following research questions are explored: How can ITE programmes more effectively integrate character, resilience, and wellbeing? What are the benefits of investigating character, resilience, and wellbeing in PST education? This presentation reports on a pilot that involves a series of online wellbeing masterclasses created during the first wave of COVID-19 for second-year Bachelor of Teaching pre-service teachers (PSTs) at an Australian University. The Carpe Diem process was adopted for the development of the overall masterclasses. Experts were interviewed on the topics of character, resilience and wellbeing education from the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. Of the 153 students enrolled in the Bachelor of Teaching, 93 students (60%) voluntarily enrolled in the masterclasses. A 10-hour parallel course was developed for teachers in 14 partner schools with 104 teachers voluntarily enrolling. This presentation provides a practical response to integrate these wellbeing approaches within ITE  to improve PST overall experience for their professional practice. This study addresses the significant gap in investigating the implications to prepare PSTs to be aware, consider and be educated in character, resilience and wellbeing education, and further research should be undertaken to discover the perspectives and experiences of PSTs and how schools and universities can work in partnership to advance wellbeing.

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  • Keywords: Education, Leadership/Management, Strengths, Systems