Abstract
M.Ed. (Educational Psychology)
The study was aimed at understanding and exploring how teachers adapt and cope with stressors in a privately-funded independent school. Much research has been done on teacher stress and its effects on delivering of quality education. Various studies conducted have found that workload, low salary, frequent changes of curriculum and students’ unruly behaviour are the sources of stress (Denhere & Chireshe, 2005). Furthermore, the sources of stress in private schools in Turkey were revealed to be inadequate resources, lack of encouragement and constant supervision from school administrators, low social status of the profession, indiscipline among students, as well as high expectations from parents (Aydin & Kaya, 2016).
The effects of teacher stress cannot be underestimated as it may manifest in physiological conditions such as headaches, sleep disturbances and depression (Dunham & Varma, 1998), anxiety and alcoholism (Kaur, 2011) and lack of professional commitment (Champoux, 2000).
After considering the prevalence of teacher stress and its effect on teachers delivering quality teaching and learning, the importance of deepening our understanding on how teachers resiliently adapt and cope with stressors becomes apparent in reducing teacher attrition.
The theoretical conceptual framework for the study was fundamentally based on a post-modern interpretivist paradigm using the epistemology and ontology of social constructionism (Gergen, 2009). A qualitative generic design was deemed appropriate for the study. The data for this study was collected by means of semi-structured interviews and an incomplete sentences activity. These instruments were used to elicit teachers’ views on how they adapt and cope with stressors and what protective resilience factors support them. An inductive content analysis was used in analysing the data.
The themes that emerged during data analysis pointed out protective factors enabling teacher resilience, as well as other factors that constrain or reduce teacher resilience. Those factors that enable teachers to adapt and cope with stressors include: commitment to learners, professional development and freedom,..