Mindfulness study finds stress relief gaps among English teachers

Burned-out English teachers do not need another vague wellness slogan. They need tools that fit the school day, and a new pilot study from Türkiye suggests mindfulness may help only if it is taught as practical professional development, not as a private self-care add-on.

The brief research report in Frontiers in Psychology, published June 11, 2026 by Oya Pelin Bektaş of Yunus Emre Secondary School in Bayburt and Merve Geçikli of Atatürk University in Erzurum, looked at 31 secondary-school English as a foreign language teachers and followed up with semi-structured interviews with eight of them. The project was designed as the first phase of a larger intervention effort, with a simple question at its core: what do teachers already know, feel and need before mindfulness training can work in a real school setting?

On the survey side, the researchers used two standard tools, the Mindfulness in Teaching Scale and the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills. The teachers showed moderate overall mindfulness, but the profile was uneven. They scored stronger in observing and describing, while acting with awareness and accepting without judgment lagged behind. Observing was the strongest predictor of overall mindfulness, a sign that awareness alone was not enough to tell the whole story.

The interviews filled in the gaps behind those numbers. Most teachers said they had limited prior knowledge of mindfulness, but many could see how it might help with emotional regulation, stress reduction and classroom climate. At the same time, they named the same obstacles that shape so many school reforms: too little time, not enough training, pressure from institutions and the risk that administrators or parents might dismiss the work as soft or irrelevant. Even so, the teachers were interested in professional development that offered clear concepts and classroom-ready strategies.

That tension, caution mixed with openness, is what makes the study useful. It suggests mindfulness in schools is most likely to gain traction when it is tied to everyday teaching conditions, not treated as a personal reset button for exhausted staff. The authors’ framing fits a broader policy picture as well. OECD TALIS 2024 covered 55 education systems and found that in Türkiye the most common stressors were being held responsible for student achievement, too much administrative work and too much marking. The same data showed 86% of teachers reported overall job satisfaction, but only 21% were satisfied with their salaries, and just 9% of teachers under 30 expected to leave within five years.

Earlier research points in the same direction. A 2024 Frontiers study of 387 Chinese EFL educators linked mindfulness to lower burnout, a 2022 Frontiers review argued that mindful and compassionate training can help EFL teachers build foreign language enjoyment, and a brief four-session, six-hour intervention reduced self-reported stress, burnout and depression. Taken together, the new pilot does not read like a finished cure. It reads like the groundwork for training that teachers might actually trust, use and carry back into classrooms that need steadier climate as much as calmer minds.