“Spilno for Teachers” Educational Visits: Summary

As part of the “Spilno for Teachers” project, the Teach For Ukraine team, in partnership with UNICEF Ukraine, conducted 14 support visits for educators across the country. Olya Yurchyshyn, Head of School & Community Partnerships at Teach For Ukraine, along with experts — psychologist Anastasiia Anosova and Ukraine’s Education Ombudsman Serhii Horbachov — met with teachers in various regions: Kyiv, Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv oblasts.

The aim of the visits was in-person engagement and expert support for teachers, to better understand their challenges and help find solutions. Each visit included two main components: a psychosocial support session focused on well-being during wartime; and a session on teachers’ rights.

As a result: a wave of positive emotions from face-to-face interaction, deep listening to the pressing issues educators face, and open dialogue on how to address them together.
Together with psychologist Anastasiia Anosova, teachers explored self-help techniques and strategies to strengthen their resilience. In the session with Education Ombudsman Serhii Horbachov, they co-developed draft policy orders for school-specific scenarios — such as dealing with air raid alerts during or before lessons, or arranging transportation for students coming from other locations.
 


“Our team is always happy to travel and meet with educators across Ukraine. We talk a lot with teachers — it helps us better understand the educational landscape and respond more effectively to its challenges. This initiative mattered to us because it brought together proactive educators who genuinely care about the future of education in Ukraine. And for us, this is a powerful indicator that we’ve chosen the right kind of partnership with schools,” – said Olha Yurchyshyn, Head of School & Community Partnerships at Teach For Ukraine NGO.



 







Despite power outages and air raids, the meetings continued — some were even held in shelters or lit by candlelight.
The team approached each teacher’s experience with care, keeping a strong focus on mental health, providing psychological support, and examining the unique challenges educators face amid full-scale war.

“Spilno for Teachers” is a project supporting teachers’ mental health and helping them overcome the challenges of wartime teaching. The project is implemented by Teach For Ukraine NGO with the support of UNICEF Ukraine, as part of the “Spilno to Learning” initiative.