Primary school teachers' resilience and their readiness for enhancing children's resilience

摘要

Resilience is an important trait, which enables people to successfully recover from difficulties and stress. For teachers, resilience is of vital importance, as it offers different ways and solutions to successfully cope with difficult and stressful situations they face on a daily basis. The way teachers experience and react to stress often affects their pupils, who are under a lot of stress as well. Teachers could help and teach them how to cope with stressful situations by spending some school time on the subject. To our best knowledge, the resilience of teachers in Slovenia is not well researched yet. The object of the present work is therefore to investigate the resilience of primary school teachers and determine what factors influence their readiness to encourage pupils to develop their own resilience. The research was made by surveying 103 teachers from 16 primary schools in Slovenia. The teachers filled out a Resilience test and a Questionnaire on their readiness to encourage pupils to develop their own resilience. The results have shown that teachers generally exhibit a high degree of resilience. According to the survey, they feel most resilient in their ability to control events. These were followed by factor related to the positive acceptance of change and secure relationships; teachers notion of personal competence, high standard and tenacity. Teachers feel less resilient at trusting themselves in dealing with difficulties and lastly at spirituality. We did not find any significant influence of age/years of service on resilience of teachers. There are several factors which influences on teacher's readiness to enhance children's resilience. The findings suggest that most teachers approve and support programs for developing pupil's resilience. Most teachers perceive school climate as supportive and think they have good conditions for the implementation of programs which promotes pupils resilience. While teachers are prepared to promote the socio-emotional development in pupils, they consider it less important than promoting the development of their thinking. Although most teachers are aware of their role in promoting the resilience of their pupils, some of them consider it a responsibility of parents and some do not consider themselves enough competent for the task. Based on our research we also discovered that the more resilient teachers are more keen on helping their pupils develop resilience as well.