Enhancing Turkish EFL teachers' professional well-being: The effectiveness of a positive psychology-based intervention program

Positive psychology deals with positive experiences that individuals and groups of people go through at three different times, that is, in the past (well-being, contentment, and satisfaction), in the present (happiness and flow), and in the future (optimism and hope). Well-being, which is an integral part of positive psychology, does not have an exact and widely accepted definition and is described through certain synonyms, such as happiness, self-actualization, contentment, adjustment, economic prosperity, and quality of life. One of the most comprehensive models of well-being was proposed by Seligman in his model of PERMA, which is an acronym for Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Although overshadowed by student-centred education, which has long been the focus of all levels of education, from primary and secondary to tertiary education, teacher well-being has just started to be seen as an integral part of educational processes. Today, it is even acknowledged that student well-being starts with teacher well-being since the teacher has a profound effect on classroom ethos and culture. Considering these, the present doctoral study aims to contribute to the limited body of literature on teacher well-being by revealing Turkish EFL teachers' well-being levels and the factors affecting them. With its applied part, on the other hand, it sought to propose a positive psychology-based intervention program that could be used to enhance EFL teachers' well-being. In line with these objectives, a mixed methods approach was adopted in this study, which is cross-sectional. The quantitative research data used in the descriptive part of the present study was collected using the PERMA-Profiler and the Workplace PERMA-Profiler. In addition, a set of semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 30 respondents of these scales, selected following the maximum variation method, in order to learn more about the factors affecting their well-being levels. The data obtained from the PERMA-Profiler and the Workplace PERMA-Profiler were analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 25.0, and the prescriptive analysis method was utilized to analyse the qualitative data obtained from the interviews. In conclusion, the findings of the scales were triangulated by the responses given to the interview questions. It was also learned that Turkish EFL teachers' professional well-being levels are affected by their private lives, their educational levels and backgrounds, their relationships with their students, students' parents, colleagues and administrators, their students' motivation to learn English, their colleagues' teacher identities, their salaries, their pastime habits and sporting activities, their religious beliefs and practices, their career plans, their political views, the number of the courses they give a week, the education regulations and the English curriculum in use, the course books they are obliged to use by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), the number of the students in their classes, the facilities of the school buildings and the campuses, the technological tools available to them at schools, their states of physical and psychological health and Turkish people's perception of the English language and the profession of English language teaching. The positive psychology-based intervention program offered in this doctoral study was conducted with 10 voluntary EFL teachers who had low levels of professional well-being. After the two-month program finished, the Workplace PERMA-Profiler was conducted with the participants of the program once again, which makes it quasi-experimental research with a one-group pretest-posttest design. The quantitative data obtained from the scale was analyzed with the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test to calculate how effective the program was. The results showed that the positive psychology-based intervention program significantly increased the participants' professional well-being levels in terms of Positive Emotion, Relationships, Meaning, and Overall Well-being domains of the Workplace PERMA-Profiler. However, no significant increase was seen in the participants' professional well-being in terms of Engagement and Accomplishment domains. Furthermore, two more sets of individual interviews were carried out within the context of the intervention program, one of which was conducted in the middle of the program, while the other was implemented at the end. The first set aimed to help the participants do properly one of the exercises of the program. The second set, on the other hand, sought to learn the participants' opinions about the effectiveness of the program. The answers of the interviewees were analysed prescriptively, and it was concluded that although the program, as a whole, was effective in improving EFL teachers' professional well-being, some interventions, or exercises, need to be revised for better future applications. Keywords: PERMA, positive psychology, positive psychology-based intervention program (PPIP), teacher well-being, teaching English as a foreign language, well-being