This article was published on Essential Resources blog 8th August 2024
In education, building teacher resilience is vital, it enables educators to maintain their wellbeing despite facing persistent setbacks and challenges. This adaptability and capacity for growth not only enhances teacher wellbeing but also positively impacts student outcomes. Join expert author Jo Maloney as she discusses resilience strategies to support educators in your early years setting.
Teacher wellbeing and resilience
Resilience encompasses the capacity of individuals, groups, and organisations to endure and rebound from stressors, potentially fostering growth in the process. It involves the flexibility to adjust thinking and responses to effectively navigate current challenges. While coping involves managing adversity to merely persevere, resilience entails learning and evolving from challenges, and contributes to overall wellbeing. Specifically, within education, teacher resilience enables them to sustain their commitment to teaching despite persistent setbacks and difficult circumstances. This ability to adapt, thrive, and grow is supported by protective factors (Kaveri et al.,2022), underscoring its critical importance across educational environments.
Resilience develops over time and can include repeated struggles, suffering, doubt, and significant changes to our ways of being. We benefit from identifying protective factors and strategies that will support the long-term and ongoing process of developing resilience to support educators’ wellbeing and learning outcomes for children.
How building resilience impacts teacher performance and student outcomes
Resilience for children is dependent on the resilience of their people in their immediate environment. Studies have identified that teachers with low resilience have considerably depleted levels of self-confidence, hope for the future and confidence in their work. Educators with higher levels of resilience experience a higher level of job satisfaction and are less likely to leave the profession and are more adaptable to change and challenges (Beltman et al., 2020).
Teachers with low resilience, poor mental health or burnout become less responsive to children’s attachment needs and cues which results in negative outcomes for children’s socioemotional development (Park et al. 2020). Resilient educators are more likely to inspire curiosity, creativity, and a growth mindset among their students and foster social and emotional skills in children leading to improved behavioural outcomes.
Protective factors for educators
Supportive relationships play a crucial role in developing and sustaining resilience. Building positive connections with colleagues not only helps to alleviate workplace pressures but also provides essential emotional, social, and personal support, thereby reducing emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion, a key indicator of burnout as highlighted by Bull and colleagues (2024), is closely linked to educators’ intentions to leave the profession.
Maintaining a passion for one’s work and a strong commitment to working with children, along with striving for quality outcomes, has been recognised as a protective factor (Kaveri et al., 2022). Altruistic beliefs, such as the desire to positively impact the lives of children, families, and communities, also contribute significantly to resilience.
Additionally, self-care practices are vital protective factors. Creating opportunities to disconnect from work, plays a crucial role in maintaining well-being and resilience (Beltman et al., 2020).
Resilience has been underpinned by research from several areas such as mindset and mental toughness, both impact our thoughts, actions and feelings.
Strategies for building resilience in educators
Engage in self-care practices which may include regular physical activity (walking, dancing, gym, yoga), gratitude practices, being playful and/or celebrating big and small successes.
Consider if you are approaching your role predominately with a fixed or growth mindset.
Reflect on your internal explanatory style -is what you are telling yourself completely accurate, fair (for yourself and others) and/or helpful- consider reminders or triggers to support you to do this in the moment.
Minimise ruminating about worst case scenarios, generate an alternate best-case scenario and recognise most likely outcomes.
Seek out professional development opportunities to build a sense of pedagogical competence and autonomy in your role.
Create opportunities to network with colleagues.
Seek out a mentor within your workplace or within the sector.
Protective factors for children
Resilience is considered to have a number of components: encountering risks, threats, or adversities (such as stressful situations or challenging social conditions); possessing internal protective factors and attributes (including personal qualities); and having external resources to mitigate risk factors, leading to either positive adaptation or the prevention of negative outcomes (Georgescu et al., 2019).
Protective factors in becoming resilient for children also include developing self-regulation skills, having self-efficacy or strong self-belief. Positive emotion and related positive affect is associated with better functioning and building resilience (Ronen, 2021). Protective factors that contribute to their ability to be resilient also include having supporting relationships with significant people where they experience support and opportunities to learn coping strategies.
Strategies to building resilience for children
Give genuine, specific feedback based on effort and the learning process rather than outcome to support growth mindset development.
Facilitate an environment where help-seeking is encouraged and normalised.
Use your own mistakes and struggles as teaching opportunities of how to deal with mistakes and the learning occasions this provides.
Use movement and exercise to positively influence self-esteem.
Support children to challenge their explanatory style when displaying counterproductive views of themselves and others. Facilitate gentle self-appraisal and reflection on what they are saying about themselves or others completely accuracy, fairness (for themselves and others) and/or helpfulness.
Provide opportunities to develop new skills and mentor peers in their areas of strength and skill.
Help children to identify and develop supportive relationships with peers and adults.
Explicitly teach skills to engage with peers using pro-social skills, don’t assume that all children will learn this from engaging with others, particularly children who have experienced trauma or toxic stress.
Support the expression and experience of positive emotion.
Provide multiple opportunities for children to determine own play choices in unstructured learning experiences.
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