Covid-19 pandemic strengthened the psychological stress as of March 2020, when the schools were closed and officials asked to conduct strict quarantines and social distance (MacIntyre et al., 2020). Educational institutions had been quite overcome by Covid 19 pandemic especially since teaching moved online from face to face (Basilia & Kvavadze, 2020; Daniel, 2020). These issues have brought many challenges in addition to current concerns (Aperribai, 2020). There are approximately 1.54 billion children affected by 185 countries all over the world. Inability to access the necessary technological tools by both students and teachers, lack of prior training on the technological tools, lack of effective online learning support platforms are some of the components increasing teachers' stress during Covid-19 (Scleicher, 2020). Turkey took emergency pedagogical decisions but the same problems on the technological tools continued. These problems put a severe burden on teachers such as long working hours, difficulty to balance between home and school, isolation from social life, losing control over the class, difficulties about changing teaching methods and transition to the technological devices, decrease in self-esteem, and last but not least, fear of Covid-19 disease (Mercer & Gregersen, 2020; Pertie, 2020). Struggling with all of the rapid and massive changes leads them to undergo extreme stress and creates a potential threat to teachers’ mental health (Baker et. al, 2021). 

Stress  generally refers to psychological and physiological reactions to the stressors which create threats to well-being and have an impact on the physical conditions (Lazarus, 1996; 2006). Coping is a process of responding to stressors by using variable techniques (MacIntyre et. al., 2020). Coping is a vital component of psychological adjustment and wellbeing (Gustems-Carnicer & Calderoni 2013; Pyhaltö et al., 2020). Using coping strategies in response to stressors became a vital issue for teachers since their wellbeing has an impact on various classrooms including students, families, and other teachers. Herman et al. (2020) suggested a “3C Theory of Teachers Stress” that integrates the various factors affecting the teacher stress including the individual differences; 1. coping, 2. competence in performing teaching practices while managing the teaching-learning process, 3. context of the teaching including the policies, administrative support, and practices. As it is indicated by the third factor, teacher stress can be expanded beyond the individual teaching context to the wider environment and context of the teaching practices.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a psychobiological approach that addresses the problems of stress, negative life experiences, and trauma while focusing on the body and its reactions. This approach helps to understand the sensations in the body and to build the innate balancing capacity of the nervous system in a short period of time (Levine, 2010; Payne et. al, 2015). If the stress responses turn chronic and long-term, autonomic nervous systems may not be able to regulate themselves (Levine et. al, 2018). In addition, the system is stuck on this threat response cycle in a dysfunctional way. Therefore, SE aims to decrease high activation and attempt to develop a person's capacity for staying in the tolerance window by using regulation skills such as tracking, titration, orientation, and resources. As mentioned above, teaching is one of the most stressful professions in the world which has undergone many changes in order to adapt to the changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of support to teachers in this very stressful time may cause the burnout of teachers hence it is very important to bring support to teachers  especially in this period of time. Thus  this study aims to see the effectiveness of SE on teachers’ interoceptive awareness, coping and mindful attention, and burnout level.

The effects of SE-based interventions sessions were evaluated in a quasi-experimental design over a period of two months with 1,5 months follow-up. The control group consisted of the teachers who did not want to attend the project. Thus, the potential short intervention was not planned for this group. Instruments including COPE-R, MAIA, MAAS, and Maslach Burnout Inventory were sent to teachers and the control group before starting the SE sessions, right after the ending of the sessions. For the follow-up study, the questionnaires will be sent again and semi-structured interviews will be conducted with each teacher to understand the effect of SE sessions in their lives. The participants consisted of 19 female teachers, one school principal, and two assistants working at the same school. They were all females between the ages of 29 to 64, with a mean of 41.7 and a standard deviation of 8.9. All participants defined themselves as Turkish. The control groups consisted of 6 male and 12 female teachers between the ages of 25 to 56 with a mean of 34.05 and a standard deviation of 9.60. All control group members defined themselves as Turkish. Sessions were conducted via zoom and ran from 90 minutes to 50 minutes with a mean of 55 minutes and a median of 60 minutes. Session protocols were prepared by SE Turkey Supervisor and shared with SE practitioners. There were certain individual differences at different sessions. However, each session was asked to adhere to the protocol while meeting the individual needs of the teachers. Five group supervision sessions with practitioners conducted by SE Turkey Supervisor. The quantitative analysis of the questionnaires was conducted by using the IBM SPSS program with descriptive analysis and T-test to understand the demographics of participants and to compare the effectiveness of the SE sessions between the experimental groups and the control group. After follow-up scores are achieved, ANCOVA will be conducted in order to understand the effect of SE. Content analysis will be used for qualitative data and the analyst triangulation will be used with one SE practitioner and one academic from the Educational Sciences Department in Middle East Technical University (METU). The whole procedure was conducted according to the ethical permission from METU Applied Ethics Research Centre (Ethics Committee).

As a result of the analysis, the data collected from the 19 participants who made up the experimental group and 18 participants from the control group were examined. After normality analysis was conducted, independent samples T-test was used between pretest and posttest of experimental and control groups. The results show that the pre-test of groups is not significantly different from each other for all variables (p> .05). As compared to the control group, a significant increase was observed in pretest (M=54.96, SD=15.44) and post-tests (M=60.35, SD=11.76) of mindful attention awareness and pretest (M=89.35; SD=5.88) and post-test (M=102.00, SD=4.87) of interoceptive awareness. Similarly, a significant increase was observed in the pre-test (M=86.95, SD=5.88), and post-test (M=88.65, SD=8.46) scores of the participants' coping score, on the other hand; there was no significant difference between pretest (M= 70.35, SD=2.87) and post-test (M=62.5, SD=1.62) scores of burn out level in comparison to control group. This study demonstrates that the SE-based sessions are effective in increasing their mindful attention awareness, interoceptive awareness, and coping skills. In order to examine the effectiveness of the study in detail, follow-up data will be received and individual interviews will be held with the participants during February.

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