Online Socio-emotional Dyad Training for School Teachers' Well-being and Social Skills

The teaching profession is widely recognized as highly demanding, and teachers report elevated rates of stress and burnout. If left unaddressed, burnout adversely affects teachers' health, job performance, teaching quality, and school turnover rates. Moreover, teacher burnout has important consequences for students. Teachers' emotional exhaustion has been shown to negatively affect students' academic achievement and self-concept in Germany. Given teachers' pivotal role in shaping children's socio-emotional development, addressing psychological vulnerability-including stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and exhaustion-is essential. Strengthening resilience enables teachers to maintain well-being and effective classroom functioning in the face of adversity by supporting adaptive stress management. In addition, strong interpersonal skills such as empathy, compassion and high-quality listening play an important role in the teacher-student communication. Addressing psychological vulnerability and strengthening resilience and social skills, is essential not only for teacher well-being but also for the functioning of educational systems broadly. In recent years, mindfulness-based interventions focusing on individual mental practices have been expanded to include partner-based social practices (Dyads), which specifically target social skills such as empathy, (self-)compassion, social connectedness and different types of listening. However, dyadic interventions, that is daily mental practices done with a partner, have not yet been systematically investigated in educational settings. Existing evidence suggests that contemplative Dyads may be more effective than solitary mindfulness practices in reducing loneliness and social stress, enhancing social connection, and strengthening resilience. Moreover, dyadic practices appear to engage mechanisms that differ from those underlying traditional mindfulness-based interventions. Empathy, (self-)compassion, and high-quality listening are core socio-emotional skills in school contexts. However, empathy may lead to empathic distress when individuals are repeatedly exposed to others' suffering, whereas compassion is considered more protective due to its association with positive affect and prosocial motivation. To address this distinction, the Edu:Social School Study 2 implements an empathy-compassion Dyad training program (EmCo), which trains participants in empathic listening and emotion regulation during the first four weeks, followed by (self-)compassion and compassionate listening during the subsequent four weeks. The EmCo program builds on the Affect Dyad developed in the ReSource project and the online Dyad 10-week intervention program with weekly online coachings and daily app-based Dyads implemented in the CovSocial project. These two large-scale mental training studies, have shown that different types of practices produce distinct effects on psychological and biological outcomes. The ReSource project, a 9-month longitudinal study using behavioral, hormonal, autonomic and neuroimaging (fMRI) measures, compared three training modules, including a mindfulness-based "Presence" module, a socio-affective "Affect" module (including the Affect Dyad) and a socio-cognitive "Perspective" module, and demonstrated that training content differentially affects mind, behavior and brain. Building on this work, the CovSocial project implemented a 10-week fully online design comparing a low-dose purely online socio-emotional Dyad training with a mindfulness-based active control training group. Results showed both shared and distinct effects: while both interventions improved mental health outcomes such as depression, anxiety, emotion regulation, and compassion, the Dyad training showed stronger effects on resilience, positivity bias, social connectedness, and reductions in loneliness and social stress. Further, mediation analyses suggest that individual mindfulness practices and partner-based Dyadic practices influence well-being through partly distinct psychological mechanisms, whereas care-based motivational processes could account for Dyad-practice effects and thought-related process for mindfulness-practice effects. Compared with these prior interventions, the present Edu:Social School intervention program introduces a novel empathy versus compassion listening component and reduces the duration from 10 to 8 weeks, improving feasibility within applied school settings. In an initial Edu:Social School pilot study, 120 teachers participated in a 10-week socio-emotional training program (EmCo). The pilot demonstrated high compliance and provided preliminary evidence for reductions in psychological vulnerability. However, the study lacked an active control group and a reliable waitlist control group, limiting interpretation. In addition, the 10-week duration was difficult to implement within the German school calendar. The present study is a randomized controlled trial in a sample of school teachers (target N = 900). A multimethod assessment approach will be used, including validated trait and state self-report questionnaires, behavioral phone-based tasks administered via an app application, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) delivered through smartphone notifications. These different assessments are capturing changes across the nine domains mentioned before. After providing informed consent, participants will be randomized to one of three groups: (1) an empathy-compassion training group (EmCo), based on the Affect Dyad daily mental practice; (2) a mindfulness-based training group, based on attention-based mindfulness practices; or (3) a waitlist control group (WLC). All participants will first complete a pre-test assessment phase, including baseline psychometric measures, phone-based tasks, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Participants in the intervention groups will then be onboarded through two group-specific online sessions (Onboarding I and II) led by trained instructors, followed by participation in their respective 8-week programs delivered via a dedicated web and smartphone application. These programs include daily partner-based Dyad practices or mindfulness meditations, respectively, as well as weekly 1.5-hour online coaching sessions with expert mental training teachers. Throughout the intervention period, participants will complete brief weekly self-report questionnaires, EMA, and daily pre-post Dyad practice ratings (DPR) to assess changes in key psychological and social processes, which will be examined as potential mediators. At the end of the intervention, all participants will complete a post-test assessment phase comparable to the pre-test (T0) and mid-test (TM), with the addition of a final feedback questionnaire. Following completion of the initial post-test (T1), participants in the waitlist control group will subsequently receive the same 8-week socio-emotional Dyad intervention (EmCo) and complete an additional mid-tests (TM1) and post-test assessment (T2). After both training groups (EmCo and MBT) have completed their respective interventions, participants will be offered the opportunity to continue their practice via the study app. Participants in the EmCo group will be invited to continue the Dyad practice, whereas participants in the MBT group may choose to continue either the mindfulness-based practice or switch to the EmCo Dyad intervention. This phase of voluntary continued practice will take place in parallel with the 8-week EmCo Dyad training offered to the WLC following post-test. The study was preregistered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) and is publicly available at https://osf.io/x59pk

A brief self-report screening measure assessing core depressive symptoms, including depressed mood and anhedonia (Kroenke et al., 2003). Higher scores indicate greater depressive symptom severity.

Time frame: Assessed weekly during the course of 8 weeks