Teaching Through Air-Raid Alerts: What Ukrainian Teachers Carry

Design a teacher training program in peacetime and you think about pedagogy. Design one for Ukraine in wartime and you start somewhere else entirely: with what a school day actually looks like.

The interrupted classroom

A lesson that moves to the shelter mid-sentence. A class where a third of students joined this year from other regions, each with a different curriculum history. Power cuts that make "just continue online" a fiction. Teachers describe planning every lesson in two versions — with electricity and without.

The invisible load

Teachers are also the adults children watch to learn whether things are okay. Many carry their own displacement, losses and fear while projecting calm for thirty children. Burnout in this profession is not a buzzword; it is an operational risk to every recovery plan the country has.

What support has to look like

Practical, immediately usable, and respectful of teachers' time: catch-up methods that work alongside the regular curriculum, trauma-informed practice that doesn't require a psychology degree, formats for teaching through disruption, and — not least — attention to teachers' own wellbeing. That is the design brief for our teacher support program, built with practicing teachers, launching in 2026.

Published April 2026. Questions about this article? Contact us.