Resilience as a Determining Ability in Becoming a Teacher: Comparing Beginning and Expert Teachers' Perspectives

• In Event: Mentoring in Teacher Induction Programs: Helping Beginner Teachers to Teach

Abstract

Teacher induction programs are crucial in the beginning teachers (BT) training as they provide the essential skills to face teaching situations during the induction phase (Flores, 2019). Nonetheless, many beginning teachers report that their initial learning remains disconnected from the classroom reality (Du Plessis et al., 2020) or it is insufficient to deal with major challenges or institutional demands. Resiliency is a useful skill to develop more adaptative strategies to deal with daily classroom challenges, a way to transform negative experiences into learning, and an opportunity to grow professionally (Morgan, 2011). Evidence shows that expert resilient teachers benefit school dynamics as they successfully manage situations causing distress (Bowles & Arnaup, 2016; Tait, 2008).

Our study aims at exploring expert and beginning teachers’ resilience when dealing with challenges in their teaching.
For this purpose, we used the Teachers Resilience Self-Reflection -TRSR- (Peixoto et al., 2018), a 67-item Likert scale questionnaire measuring four dimensions: professional, emotional, motivational, and social resilience. Moreover, the TRSR examined professional commitment, master orientation, rumination, and teacher efficacy as core aspects to be resilient.
The TRSR questionnaire was handed out in printed version and via Google Forms. Most of the results came from the printed surveys (n=109) whilst the rest (n= 35) were answered online. A total of 144 teachers participated, of which, 89 were beginning teachers (BT) and 54 expert teachers (ET).

Main results indicated that 94,1% of BT and 94,4% of ET were highly confident with their professional teachers’ resilience. On the other hand, 79,8 % of beginning teachers’ and the 68,5 % reported that they had emotional self-regulation, not many expressing taking it too personally when something goes wrong (BT = 53,9 % and ET = 48,1 %). The motivational dimension shed 88,2 % of beginning teachers and 90,9 % of expert teachers considered themselves capable to deal with daily classroom struggles. However, only a 55,1 % of beginning teachers and 66,7 % of expert teachers focused on building their strengths more than their limitations.
Both groups of teachers showed high scores in the four Teachers’ resilience dimensions: Professional=4.44; emotional=3.95; Motivational=4.36; social=4.24. Only in the emotional dimension statistical differences between groups were found, as Mann-Whitney U test showed: p=0.07, where mean scores for BT=4.06 and for ET=3.76.

Generally speaking, higher results for beginning teachers were obtained, probably because they tend to idealize their job in the initial stages. This study shows that resiliency skills are highly present in the teachers' repertoires for both groups, although from the emotional point of view BT felt more confident than Et.
However, we must be cautious since the questionnaire was applied at the beginning of the first year of teaching for the beginning teachers, which might not rightfully reflect their ability to face challenging situations or they do not even have many chances to cope with them.
Learning about resilience in the induction phase is important to develop useful resources to cope with challenging situations, avoiding burning out, and reducing the risk of teacher attrition.

Authors

• Juanjo Mena, Universidad de Salamanca

• Alicia Regalado, Universidad de Salamanca

• Gloria Gratacos, C.U. Villanueva (UCM)