Decentring the ‘Resilient Reacher’: Exploring Interactions Between Individuals and Their Social Ecologies

• In Event: Cultural Connections and Global Perspectives in Teacher Training

Proposal

Teacher attrition presents a growing concern for schools internationally (Avalos & Valenzuela, 2016; European Commission, 2023). In response to these concerns a discourse has emerged around the need to ‘build teachers’ resilience’ (Mansfield et al., 2016). Policy documents such as the Early Career Framework (Department for Education, 2019) in the UK aim to tackle the teacher retention crisis by providing enhanced professional development to promote teacher competence and confidence. Implicit in such policies is the premise that if only we could make teachers better at their jobs, they would be ‘more resilient’ and stay within the profession. While teacher self-efficacy has indeed been shown to be an important predictor of resilience in teachers (Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2019), it is important to recognise that individual factors represent only one side of the teacher resilience problem. If teachers are to thrive (and stay) in their roles, action is needed to address levers for change within teachers’ professional environments as well as providing support to teachers at the individual level.

Within social-ecological framings of resilience, resilience is not a trait which resides within the individual, but rather is a process of interaction between factors operating at different ecological levels (e.g. the individual, the school, the broader policy landscape), which results in varying levels of positive adaptation (Kangas-Dick & O’Shaughnessy, 2020; Gu, 2018; Ungar et al, 2013). These factors influence teachers’ capacity for ‘positive adaptation’ – the extent to which they are able to adapt to the many demands of their professional role. Positive adaptation may be reflected by high levels of job satisfaction and wellbeing on the one hand, and low levels of stress, anxiety, burnout and depressive symptoms on the other. Our previous quantitative research found that contextual factors (e.g. support from leadership, workload and school culture) explained as much variance in measures of adaptation in teachers as individual factors (Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2019); however, this design was only able to explore the direct effects of predictors (like support from management and self-esteem) on resilience, and did not have sufficient statistical power to explore the interactions between them. Our recent qualitative research (Oldfield & Ainsworth, 2022) suggests that these interactions may be an important part of the resilience process, with teachers’ accounts of their professional experiences suggesting that individual factors (e.g. self-esteem) do not exist independently from the environment, and tend to be influenced by broader environmental factors (e.g. support from management and accountability frameworks).

Methods

The current paper will investigate these interactions, reporting data from a large-scale quantitative survey distributed to teachers across England by project partners, the National Education Union and charity, Education Support. This study is part of a broader three-year project, funded as part of the ESRC Education Research Programme. The survey was designed to measure factors which previous research has suggested to be important to the resilience process in teachers at both the individual and contextual level as well as outcome measures of adaptation. The study set out to investigate the following research questions:

RQ1: What is the relative contribution of individual versus contextual factors in predicting levels of adaptation (burnout, job satisfaction and wellbeing) in teachers?

RQ2: How do individual and contextual factors interact with each other to predict levels of adaptation in teachers?

The survey results were analysed by adopting a ‘protective’ model of resilience, allowing investigation of the interactions between predictors. In this way, we moved beyond previous ‘compensatory’ models which only explored direct independent effects (Fergus & Zimmerman, 2005; Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2019). The first step of the analytic process involved relative weights analysis (Tonidandel & Le Breton, 2014), which allowed us to assess which factors explained the most variance in teacher wellbeing, job satisfaction and burnout (RQ1). This allowed us to then focus in on the a smaller subset of key predictors, which we then inputted into a series of regression models in order to investigate potential interactions between these factors in predicting the resilience-related outcomes (RQ2). Decisions around which interactions between predictors were entered into the model were informed by theoretical considerations, including insights from previous qualitative data which demonstrates potential interactions between predictors of resilience outcomes (Oldfield & Ainsworth, 2022). Mediation analyses (Hayes, 2018) were performed to investigate the indirect effects of the different individual and contextual factors on teacher resilience as well as the direct effects.

Conclusions

The analyses suggest that the most important predictors of job satisfaction and burnout in teachers predominantly operate at the school level rather than the individual level. Adding further weight to the argument that teacher resilience should not be conceived as something which resides solely within the individual.

The mediation analyses provide evidence of indirect effects on resilience-related outcomes within and between ecological levels. The findings suggest that relational approaches to promoting teacher resilience might be especially promising given that support from management and support from colleagues appear to influence teacher resilience through multiple indirect routes. For example, the variance in teacher burnout levels explained by support from management was mediated by workload, school culture, self-esteem and conflict between beliefs and practice. In other words, teachers were less likely to feel burnout in schools where there were supportive leadership practices, because these practices affected how manageable their workloads were, how positive the culture of the school felt, how good they felt about themselves and the extent to which they felt they could teach in line with their values.

The implications of the findings for developing data-driven ‘ecological’ interventions to promote teacher resilience will be discussed, including examples of how data can be used to identify possible levers for change within schools and within the broader policy landscape.

Author

• Steph Ainsworth, Manchester Metropolitan University