Targeted to Intermediate English (B1+) speakers.Read more
This is the standard requirement for most courses. Participants at this level can participate actively in discussions and manage everyday and professional situations. If they are unsure about their English level, they can test it here or explore our courses facilitated in Basic English.
Cross-Curricular.Read more
The listed audiences are those for whom the course is especially recommended, but courses are not exclusive to them and are open to everyone. In fact, most of our workshops are built around the collective sharing of participants’ experiences and having a variety of profiles enriches the learning process and is highly encouraged!
Description
What if the most powerful tool against burnout was already inside you, waiting to be told?
Teaching is one of the most emotionally demanding professions in the world, yet educators are rarely given the space, the language, or the tools to process and reflect on what they experience in their daily work.
Over time, this can lead to stress, disconnection, and burnout, often without being fully recognised or addressed. The result is a silent epidemic: across Europe, teachers experience chronic stress and emotional exhaustion, quietly eroding the passion that once brought them into the classroom.
This course offers a radically different perspective. It draws on the proven power of storytelling and narrative techniques to help teachers reconnect with their professional identity, process difficult experiences, and rebuild emotional resilience.
Rather than approaching burnout and emotional labour only as problems to manage, participants will explore their psychological roots, learn to externalize and reframe their most challenging professional experiences through creative and screenwriting tools, and discover how meaning-making is one of the most robust predictors of long-term resilience.
Participants will work with a rich variety of practical tools: guided creative writing exercises, screenwriting techniques such as scene construction, character perspective, and turning point analysis, and reflective journaling.
Drawing on narrative psychology and post-traumatic growth research, the course will translate clinical insight into creative practice.
Also, all sharing activities will be held within a trauma-informed listening protocol, which is a structured, boundary-based approach to group sharing designed to ensure that every voice is received with safety, respect, and without judgment.
By the end of the course, participants will leave with concrete strategies to bring storytelling into their own teaching contexts, fostering empathy, psychological safety, and deeper engagement among their students.
Most importantly, they will have acquired a clearer understanding of their professional journey, a set of adaptable storytelling tools, and renewed confidence in their role as educators.
What is included
Learning outcomes
The course will help participants to:
- Understand the psychological mechanisms underlying burnout and emotional labour through a narrative lens;
- Apply screenwriting and narrative therapy techniques to process and reframe challenging professional experiences;
- Recognize personal patterns of meaning-making and their role in professional wellbeing;
- Create short personal and classroom-oriented narratives using structured storytelling tools;
- Facilitate safe and respectful sharing activities using simple, trauma-informed approaches;
- Apply storytelling strategies to support student engagement, empathy, and classroom dialogue.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Introduction to the course
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities;
- Presentations of the participants’ schools.
Who am I as a teacher? Narrative identity and the roots of burnout
- Recognize burnout as a fracture between who you are and what the system asks you to be;
- Explore the relationship between narrative identity and professional wellbeing;
- Trace the patterns of vitality and depletion across your professional story.
Day 2 – The weight you don’t talk about: stress, silence, and emotional labour
- Examine the psychological concept of emotional labour and its long-term impact on professional identity;
- Map the sources of chronic stress in your teaching context and recognise the early signs of burnout;
- Use narrative techniques from screenwriting to write the difficult moments of your
professional experience; - Develop active listening skills through a structured, trauma-informed group sharing practice.
Day 3 – Rewriting the plot: resilience and meaning-making
- Explore post-traumatic growth theory and its application to professional renewal;
- Locate the turning points in one’s professional journey and examine what they reveal about one’s resilience;
- Rewrite a challenging experience from an alternative perspective to generate new meaning and empathy;
- Articulate a clear, grounded vision of your next professional chapter.
Day 4 – Storytelling in the classroom: from personal renewal to collective practice
- Examine the research linking narrative pedagogy to student engagement;
- Analyse storytelling strategies applicable across different subjects, age groups, and learning objectives;
- Produce a short digital story as a concrete, transferable output.
Day 5 – The next chapter: integration and sustainable wellbeing
- Consolidate the week’s learning into a personal toolkit of narrative practices;
- Present their own project and receive structured peer feedback;
- Write a reflective letter to oneself as a closing integrative exercise.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competences, feedback, and discussion;
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.
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