What do you think?
Rate this book
Cultivating Teacher Resilience: International Approaches, Applications and Impact
This open access book follows the development of the Building Resilience in Teacher Education (BRiTE) project across Australia and internationally. Drawing on the success of this project and the related research collaborations that have since emerged, it highlights the importance of cultivating resilience at various stages of teachers’ careers.Divided into three sections, the book includes conceptual, empirical and applied chapters, designed to introduce readers to the field of research, provide empirical evidence and showcase innovative applications. The respective chapters illustrate the ways in which teacher resilience can be enhanced in a variety of contexts, and address specific learning activities, case studies, resources and strategies, student feedback and applied outcomes. They also consider future directions including cross-cultural applications and the use of technologies such as augmented reality. The book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators and teachers, as well as those interested in supporting the cultivation and ongoing development of professional resilience for pre-service and practicing teachers.
- GenresEducation
549 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2020
2 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 5, 2022
A couple of the authors in this edited collection make the point that resilience is too often something that is individualised. The concept itself comes from research into children who have experienced some form of trauma and is based on the observation that some of those kids bounced back more quickly and easily than others did. This got me wondering if ‘resilience’ is the best way to understand teacher work and staying power. Trauma being one thing and work-place stress perhaps something else. I’m not saying there aren’t links between these, but there are certainly also differences.
This is reporting on the implementation of a program used in teacher education called BRiTE – Buliding Resilience in Teacher Education. I hadn’t really heard of this program before, and it turns out that there is a website that includes the program modules https://www.brite.edu.au.
Someone at work advised I read this book, since we are working on a paper together on teacher wellbeing, and she was worried my original draft had focused too heavily on the ‘attrition’ aspects of wellbeing (teachers leaving the job) rather than other aspects (the positives that help teachers overcome adversity). Her first name is Cassandra, and I know just enough about Classical Literature to know you never shrug off the advice of someone who is called that.
And it is really true, I tend to stress the social factors that impact people in doing their work, guilty as charged. I do understand that different people will respond differently to the same situation, and that those differences are interesting – and I also understand that if you are thinking about starting a new career, the idea you have ‘lifted yourself up by your bootstraps’ or ‘faced the tiger and, through the sheer force of your will alone, made it cower before you’ is all very lovely and self-affirming. The problem is that we, as individuals in a society, are far too prone to taking credit and blame for things that are far too often outside our control.
I had hoped this book would be somewhat different to what it turned out to be. In an introductory chapter to this book, Beltman says, “While personal capabilities are important, focusing only on these may distract from considering the responsibilities of employers and administrator. Focusing only on wider systems may distract from the importance of individual agency where teachers can take responsibility for their own journeys.” (p.22) I had hoped there would be something on the first of these foci – but almost everything that followed focused on the second, on the journey of the individual.
I was expecting the book to provide a kind of balance between system and individual agency, between personal professional development and what ought to be the mentoring role provided by employer and employment supports. But while this book is long on mindfulness, resilience, understanding your emotional responses, the importance of understanding and developing relationships (especially those with one’s students) – it is almost entirely silent on how schools and school systems can create local environments that protect, enhance and develop early career teacher resilience.
This becomes particularly obvious in how a number of the contributing authors go about defining resilience. After quoting an Australian government body’s report advising on teacher education that said, “beginning teachers have responsibility for student learning from their first day in the classroom” and so need to be “classroom ready” from day one – McDonough and McGraw’s chapter then says, “Central to definitions of resilience is the concept of a challenge or adverse situation, along with successful coping, adaptation and learning”. (p.71)
Or, as Ledger says later “Resilience is a dynamic, multidimensional construct which develops over time when individuals are faced with adversity and difficult experiences in particular contexts.” (p.245)
In both of this definitions the situation is given and fixed, and what needs to change is the teacher – where resilience is defined as the teacher’s ability to change to meet the demands of the situation. Later, Helen Boon’s chapter begins by saying, “Perhaps exiting the profession signals a resilient person who does not accept working conditions that do not support wellbeing or teaching effectiveness” (p.263), however, this is the same problem only that it has been inverted – the situation is not expected to change and there is no proposed mechanism to facilitate such a change – the teacher either must change to accommodate the situation or leave.
A number of the chapters quoted various research that says that teaching is one of the most stressful professions and that this is a large part of the reason why attrition is so high. Which again, might make you think that there would be at least one chapter here considering how the social situation that faces early career teachers could be restructured to do more to protect their wellbeing. But that was not the case.
This book stands firmly within the tradition of positive psychology – one chapter by Falecki and Mann discusses Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, and in particular the role efficacy plays as a predictor of achieving mastery. “Efficacy can be developed through modelling, vicarious learning, social persuasion, positive feedback and experiencing mastery…” (p.181)
Which is all well and good, and while the proposed benefits of positive psychology were listed, it seemed strange to me that not only were the ‘blame the victim’ aspects of this way of understanding the world more or less ignored, but also none of the theory that has discussed the negative roles of self-surveillance was considered or even mentioned. And there’s a lot on this, from Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ to Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Burnout Society’ – there has been a lot of theory criticising the disciplining role of ‘the positive’ and what sometimes gets called ‘responsibilization’ – where those with limited power to affect change are the ones held accountable for the failures of systems that are, in fact, beyond their control.
And control is the other thing I want to talk about. Ledger’s chapter mentions Kenneth Ginsburg’s 7 Cs of resilience. I’d never heard of these, but the first of them is Control. And I think this is right. As those of us from my generation learnt well from Get Smart – the world is divided neatly between Kaos and Control. Resilience, it seems to me, is something that comes with being able to predict what is going to happen next – that is, to have at least some measure of control over events, even if just in anticipation. And this requires time and experience, as much as anything else. It also requires mastery, as many of the authors here reiterate, but mastery in teaching is paradoxical too. Berliner’s work on expert teachers shows that a key difference between the expert and the novice is that novices focus almost exclusively on the teaching process, while expert teachers focus on relationships. Other research has also found that one of the things that keeps teachers in the profession is how rewarding they find their relationships, both those they have with their students and those with their colleagues. But this, it seems to me, fits more neatly with the theory that considers communities of practice than it does with a theory based on positive psychology. The difference being that communities of practice theories have grown out of models based on the idea that learning is a kind of apprenticeship. That training wheels are wonderful at first, when falling is a real possibility, but that they very quickly get in the way and even become dangerous once they have served that purpose. That is, as more aspects of the role come under the active control of the teacher. Control and predictability and experience then lead to mastery, rather than necessarily a positive mindset and general happy demeaner.
One of the chapters did something twice here that feels like someone is forcing bamboo under my fingernails. I’ll quote – “The four psychological constructs that meet the POB (Positive Organisational Behaviour) scientific inclusion criteria are Hope, Efficacy, Resilience and Optimism (HERO)” (p.178) I have no idea how those are ‘organisational behaviours’, but the fact they spell ‘hero’ sets my teeth on edge. They then have another acronym that spells CARE. It’s all a bit like watching someone dotting their I’s with little love-hearts. I guess I could pretend I’m not judging you, but would that help at all…I suspect not.
I was surprised at this book. I just expected it to do what it said it was going to early on in the book – that is, provide both individual and collective/situational factors that go to reinforce early teacher resilience. Such a book is necessary, I feel. An interesting book to read on this topic, if not quite, is Mayer et al.’s ‘Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education: Early Career Teachers in Diverse Settings’. In that book the situatedness of teaching is presented as paramount and therefore the proposed solutions to the problems faced are more likely to be systemic, rather than focused on individual teachers.
This is reporting on the implementation of a program used in teacher education called BRiTE – Buliding Resilience in Teacher Education. I hadn’t really heard of this program before, and it turns out that there is a website that includes the program modules https://www.brite.edu.au.
Someone at work advised I read this book, since we are working on a paper together on teacher wellbeing, and she was worried my original draft had focused too heavily on the ‘attrition’ aspects of wellbeing (teachers leaving the job) rather than other aspects (the positives that help teachers overcome adversity). Her first name is Cassandra, and I know just enough about Classical Literature to know you never shrug off the advice of someone who is called that.
And it is really true, I tend to stress the social factors that impact people in doing their work, guilty as charged. I do understand that different people will respond differently to the same situation, and that those differences are interesting – and I also understand that if you are thinking about starting a new career, the idea you have ‘lifted yourself up by your bootstraps’ or ‘faced the tiger and, through the sheer force of your will alone, made it cower before you’ is all very lovely and self-affirming. The problem is that we, as individuals in a society, are far too prone to taking credit and blame for things that are far too often outside our control.
I had hoped this book would be somewhat different to what it turned out to be. In an introductory chapter to this book, Beltman says, “While personal capabilities are important, focusing only on these may distract from considering the responsibilities of employers and administrator. Focusing only on wider systems may distract from the importance of individual agency where teachers can take responsibility for their own journeys.” (p.22) I had hoped there would be something on the first of these foci – but almost everything that followed focused on the second, on the journey of the individual.
I was expecting the book to provide a kind of balance between system and individual agency, between personal professional development and what ought to be the mentoring role provided by employer and employment supports. But while this book is long on mindfulness, resilience, understanding your emotional responses, the importance of understanding and developing relationships (especially those with one’s students) – it is almost entirely silent on how schools and school systems can create local environments that protect, enhance and develop early career teacher resilience.
This becomes particularly obvious in how a number of the contributing authors go about defining resilience. After quoting an Australian government body’s report advising on teacher education that said, “beginning teachers have responsibility for student learning from their first day in the classroom” and so need to be “classroom ready” from day one – McDonough and McGraw’s chapter then says, “Central to definitions of resilience is the concept of a challenge or adverse situation, along with successful coping, adaptation and learning”. (p.71)
Or, as Ledger says later “Resilience is a dynamic, multidimensional construct which develops over time when individuals are faced with adversity and difficult experiences in particular contexts.” (p.245)
In both of this definitions the situation is given and fixed, and what needs to change is the teacher – where resilience is defined as the teacher’s ability to change to meet the demands of the situation. Later, Helen Boon’s chapter begins by saying, “Perhaps exiting the profession signals a resilient person who does not accept working conditions that do not support wellbeing or teaching effectiveness” (p.263), however, this is the same problem only that it has been inverted – the situation is not expected to change and there is no proposed mechanism to facilitate such a change – the teacher either must change to accommodate the situation or leave.
A number of the chapters quoted various research that says that teaching is one of the most stressful professions and that this is a large part of the reason why attrition is so high. Which again, might make you think that there would be at least one chapter here considering how the social situation that faces early career teachers could be restructured to do more to protect their wellbeing. But that was not the case.
This book stands firmly within the tradition of positive psychology – one chapter by Falecki and Mann discusses Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, and in particular the role efficacy plays as a predictor of achieving mastery. “Efficacy can be developed through modelling, vicarious learning, social persuasion, positive feedback and experiencing mastery…” (p.181)
Which is all well and good, and while the proposed benefits of positive psychology were listed, it seemed strange to me that not only were the ‘blame the victim’ aspects of this way of understanding the world more or less ignored, but also none of the theory that has discussed the negative roles of self-surveillance was considered or even mentioned. And there’s a lot on this, from Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ to Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Burnout Society’ – there has been a lot of theory criticising the disciplining role of ‘the positive’ and what sometimes gets called ‘responsibilization’ – where those with limited power to affect change are the ones held accountable for the failures of systems that are, in fact, beyond their control.
And control is the other thing I want to talk about. Ledger’s chapter mentions Kenneth Ginsburg’s 7 Cs of resilience. I’d never heard of these, but the first of them is Control. And I think this is right. As those of us from my generation learnt well from Get Smart – the world is divided neatly between Kaos and Control. Resilience, it seems to me, is something that comes with being able to predict what is going to happen next – that is, to have at least some measure of control over events, even if just in anticipation. And this requires time and experience, as much as anything else. It also requires mastery, as many of the authors here reiterate, but mastery in teaching is paradoxical too. Berliner’s work on expert teachers shows that a key difference between the expert and the novice is that novices focus almost exclusively on the teaching process, while expert teachers focus on relationships. Other research has also found that one of the things that keeps teachers in the profession is how rewarding they find their relationships, both those they have with their students and those with their colleagues. But this, it seems to me, fits more neatly with the theory that considers communities of practice than it does with a theory based on positive psychology. The difference being that communities of practice theories have grown out of models based on the idea that learning is a kind of apprenticeship. That training wheels are wonderful at first, when falling is a real possibility, but that they very quickly get in the way and even become dangerous once they have served that purpose. That is, as more aspects of the role come under the active control of the teacher. Control and predictability and experience then lead to mastery, rather than necessarily a positive mindset and general happy demeaner.
One of the chapters did something twice here that feels like someone is forcing bamboo under my fingernails. I’ll quote – “The four psychological constructs that meet the POB (Positive Organisational Behaviour) scientific inclusion criteria are Hope, Efficacy, Resilience and Optimism (HERO)” (p.178) I have no idea how those are ‘organisational behaviours’, but the fact they spell ‘hero’ sets my teeth on edge. They then have another acronym that spells CARE. It’s all a bit like watching someone dotting their I’s with little love-hearts. I guess I could pretend I’m not judging you, but would that help at all…I suspect not.
I was surprised at this book. I just expected it to do what it said it was going to early on in the book – that is, provide both individual and collective/situational factors that go to reinforce early teacher resilience. Such a book is necessary, I feel. An interesting book to read on this topic, if not quite, is Mayer et al.’s ‘Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education: Early Career Teachers in Diverse Settings’. In that book the situatedness of teaching is presented as paramount and therefore the proposed solutions to the problems faced are more likely to be systemic, rather than focused on individual teachers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review