Resilience and recurring adverse events: testing an assets-based model of beginning teachers’ experiences

Abstract

The burgeoning literature on ‘resilience’ and especially the paradigmatic change guiding the research has important implications for understanding the experience of adverse events at work. Based on an overview of the relevant literature in developmental, social and clinical psychology, three main assets contributing to ‘bouncing back’ from adversity are identified in order to establish their contribution to beginning teachers’ (first year of teaching) efforts to cope with negative events at school. Specifically, the present study sought to examine how these assets (strengths, social support and coping skills) that have been found to facilitate resilience in extant research, translate to the experiences of teachers’ methods of recovering from adverse events (Study 1) and to gauge the relative contribution of these assets in facilitating the ability to recover from adversity (Study 2). Results indicate that the assets that a beginning teacher brings to the encounters have a powerful influence on recovery from negative happenings. Furthermore, these resilience-facilitating factors do not predict general Teacher Efficacy, indicating that resilience can be thought of as a separate construct. The conclusion seems warranted that the assets model has important implications for understanding interventions that address the capacity to recover from setbacks including those occurring at work as well as in childhood.

Keywords:

• resilience
• assets
• beginning teachers
• teacher efficacy
• adversity

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Rachel Perkins, Mary Glynn, Karl Kitching, Nancy Morgan and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft. A special debt of gratitude is due to Mary Burke, National Co-ordinator of the National Induction Project (primary) for her inspirational leadership of that project. A paper based on these results was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual meeting in San Diego, April 2009.