Preparing resilient educators: A narrative review on CBT-based workshops for pre-service teachers

Teacher stress and early career attrition represent global challenges in education, yet significant gaps exist in understanding how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-based interventions can build resilience in pre-service teachers. While mindfulness and social-emotional learning programs have received attention, few studies have systematically examined CBT workshops for teacher preparation or explored their implications for advancing evaluation methodology in educational contexts. This narrative review addresses these gaps by synthesizing evidence on CBT-based workshops for pre-service teachers while examining contributions to evaluation scholarship. Across diverse cultural and institutional contexts, CBT interventions consistently reduced stress, improved emotional regulation, and enhanced self-efficacy, with immediate benefits and variable long-term outcomes. The mechanistic clarity of CBT's cognitive restructuring approach enables precise measurement of causal pathways, making these interventions particularly suitable for theory-driven evaluation frameworks. The review reveals three critical contributions to evaluation methodology: validation of theory-driven approaches in complex educational settings, demonstration that cultural adaptation enhances program effectiveness without compromising evaluation rigor, and illumination of temporal complexity in preventive interventions. These findings provide lessons for the international evaluation community about implementing and assessing preventive interventions across diverse contexts. This study contributes a novel perspective demonstrating how CBT-based interventions can inform both teacher education program design and advancement of evaluation theory and practice.