Context: The school is a private, faith-based school in South Africa who teaches students from Grade 0 to Grade 12. After covid, teachers were trying to come to grips with the burnout they had experienced during the constant emerging changes of Covid. During Covid teachers had to move from face-to-face classroom teaching to online teaching in a matter of 3 weeks as lockdown in South Africa commenced. After the lock down was lifted teachers were faced with teaching face-to-face as well as online simultaneously to accommodate students from vulnerable families who could not return to school when lock down regulations were alleviated, had to co-regulate students who had to maintain social distancing and were unable to see each other’s and teachers’ facial expressions properly due to the wearing of masks, and had to process the risks to their own health and safety.

During various waves teachers had to contend with temporary lockdown’s that disrupted exams and teaching due to covid regulations. Their nervous systems had to contend with a state of continuous instability and an impossibility of creating routine within the teaching environment.

At the point of the intervention, covid restrictions have been lifted completely and extra-curricular activities were resuming. Teachers found returning to “normal” extremely stressful as change fatigue and chronic stress have taken its toll. The Executive of the School was looking for an intervention to assist teachers through the transition to “normal”.

Intervention: The case study that will be presented used a condensed Appreciative Inquiry format adapted based on applied neuroscience principles. The applied neuroscience models and theories integrated for the adaptation of the intervention were:

Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2021)

The consistency-theoretical model (Grawe, 2007)

Functional large scale neural networks (Menon, 2011; Arden, 2019)

Neuro-narrative therapy (Zimmerman, 2018).