On May 23, 2023, a group of teachers from Centre d’Estudis Dolmen completed a 20-hour teacher professional development program on the science of stress. The program was carried out within the framework of the European project (Erasmus+) RemixED. The project is coordinated by the TIDE group of Pompeu Fabra University.

In the 2022-23 academic year, a total of 57 teachers from different schools involved in the project completed the program: SEK-Atlântic (Vigo), Lykeio Archangelou Apostolos Markos (Cyprus), 10.klasseskolen (Denmark) and Center d'Estudis Dolmen (Catalonia). In the case of Centre d’Estudis Dolmen, 13 teachers participated in the program which involved having teachers redesign lessons on the science of stress, use them in classrooms, reflect on and document the impact of the lessons on students, and generate lessons learned for future implementations.

To carry out this professional development program, a team-based learning design methodology was used. This methodology encourages collaboration and discussion among teaching staff. Teams of teachers produced six implementations with students during the program. The diversity of the implementations was an aspect of the program that has brought more richness to the whole process. Materials were used with students from baccalaureate tutorial action to class projects and preparatory training for work centres. Teachers incorporated different approaches such as preparing students for oral presentations and test-taking, to improving mental preparedness for handling basic life support in auxiliary nursing care .

Each teaching group designed an activity adapting open educational resources on the science of stress. This activity was shared with the rest of the teaching groups, improved, and finally used with students. Thus, these sessions have been the result of collaboration of all participating teachers, but with different approaches depending on the educational stage and the group they were aimed at.

Students have responded very positively to the sessions that have taken place. As they point out, it has helped them to access science-based information on a subject they had always heard spoken about colloquially:

Stress is something that is mentioned a lot among friends, 'I'm very stressed...'. But at the school level or at the data level of 'this happens for this reason and causes these things' where I am, it is not talked about or mentioned either at school or among peers.

For me personally, it is the first time that someone has spoken to me like this about stress and what should be taken into account.

The usefulness of having this more accurate information stands out as a very positive fact:

The most useful part was knowing the physical reactions that happen when we are stressed. I think it can help us recognize that we are stressed at the moment to be in control of what is happening.

This has even made students, in some cases, look for "more information about stress". Students also highlight the positive effects that they have already noticed, and those they anticipate on their academic performance after learning about breathing techniques and stress mindsets:

Regarding breathing techniques, I noticed that in classes that came after I was more relaxed, and I noticed that I was more focused and that I understood it better.

In class we were talking a lot about the mentality of stress (...) in the exam, thanks to changing the mentality at the beginning of the exam (...) I think I did well ( ...) in the exam things came out easier for me and I remembered more.

Seeing this complicated situation more as something to overcome is also very helpful.

In summary, the students were able to access a more nuanced, more informed view of stress:

Stress has its negative parts but it also has its positive aspects, because sometimes when you are very relaxed about something you need a little activation.

Some of the teaching staff participating in the program also joined in a focus group with researchers from the Pompeu Fabra University. In the focus group,  it was possible to reflect on the implementation of the prepared sessions in relation to the project's objectives and the perceived impact on students. The collaboration and dialogue established between teaching staff in the process of preparing the materials was also highlighted as a strong point of the process.

After the implementations, three workshops were held with the teaching staff in order to reflect on and improve both the materials and the process of making them. These reflections have gone from a more internal aspect within the implementation groups to an inter-group reflection where the implementations have been analysed by sharing them with the other groups and a final stage of reflection on the development program overall professional. The richness of the analyses has made it possible to evaluate the implementations in more detail, while detecting possible improvements for a second round of workshops and implementations to take place in the 2023-24 academic year.