Resilience as a professional competence : a new way towards healthy teachers?

Abstract

Considering teachers’ poor state of health, we conducted a literature review to investigate, whether resilience, as a professional competence, has a health-promoting effect on teachers. Re-directing the seemingly inevitable trajectory from stress to illness towards health, the effects should be reflected in the improvement of teachers’ negative strain ratios. Hence, our review investigated the effect of resilience and specific resilience resources regarding teachers’ risk of burnout, stress perception and coping, general well-being, attrition rates, and effectiveness. Our results indicate that resilience supports teachers’ health, by consistently showing a positive impact on the investigated aspects. Furthermore, our catalog of identified resilience resources supports the concept of teacher-specific resilience. As effective programs for promoting teachers’ resilience are lacking, this informs new intervention approaches to promote teachers’ health.