A Satisfying School Experience: Strategies and Skills for Teachers (Barcelona 24.3. - 29.3.2025)
Participants: Suvi Sarlo, Balbina Käki and Tiina Rötkö

The title of our course was A Satisfying School Experience: Strategies and Skills for Teachers. One of the main themes on the course was communication: how to communicate better with colleagues, students and their parents. The teacher claimed that conflicts are inevitable but not necessarily a bad thing and they can have also positive outcomes. The key is how we communicate with each other.  

We also focused on mindfulness and finding our strengths. We talked a lot about burnout and how to prevent it on our everyday lives. We should take care of our own wellbeing in order to be good teachers. We should do things that give us joy. If we want to be happy, we need to be grateful.  

We also talked about emotions, and how important it is to acknowledge our emotions and those of others. We were encouraged to interpret each other’s feelings (we practiced for example in a museum and tried to interpret the feelings from the paintings), but the teachers also emphasized that we can’t know for sure if we don’t ask.  

Another theme under discussion was flow and how it can be achieved in our working life or in our free time. The teacher underlined the importance of giving the students the right amount of challenge so that they could have a satisfying school experience – the tasks shouldn’t be too easy or too difficult. Easier said than done.