Teaching is a notoriously demanding profession, requiring staff to juggle packed curricula, exam pressure, and the unpredictable behaviour of teenagers. Understanding what helps teachers stay resilient under that strain matters not only for their own well-being but also for the pupils who rely on them.
New research from Greece suggests that the way teachers cope with stress is closely tied to how resilient they are. Those who approached problems positively and sought support from others reported higher resilience, while those who tried to escape or avoid difficulties tended to report less.
The study, published in Psychology International, was carried out by Niki Aikaterini Koromila and Maria Platsidou of the Department of Educational and Social Policy at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. It surveyed 200 teachers working in public secondary schools in urban and suburban areas of Greece.
Most of the participants were women, with 154 female and 46 male teachers taking part. Their average age was about 52, and they had an average of almost 20 years of teaching experience.
The teachers completed a resilience scale designed specifically for teachers, alongside a widely used questionnaire measuring different ways of coping with stress. The researchers then examined how the two sets of answers were related.
Resilience levels ranged from moderate to high. The strongest protective factors were emotional and behavioural adequacy, such as organising the classroom to handle challenges, and the teachers’ own values and beliefs about their work.
The weakest area was relationships within the school environment, including support from colleagues and school leaders. By contrast, teachers appeared to lean more heavily on family and friends outside school, a pattern the authors suggest may reflect a greater sense of psychological safety in personal relationships.
When it came to coping, a positive approach and seeking social support were the most commonly used strategies. Together, the five coping strategies measured explained almost 44% of the differences in overall resilience between teachers.
A positive approach emerged as the strongest predictor of higher resilience, followed by seeking social support. Escape and avoidance, on the other hand, predicted lower resilience, while confrontive coping, which involves taking risks to tackle a problem head-on, made no significant difference.
One surprising finding was that wishful thinking, usually seen as a passive coping style, was a small but significant positive predictor of resilience. The authors suggest it may offer teachers a temporary psychological refuge when stressors feel persistent or hard to control.
The researchers argue that schools could help by offering mentoring networks, mindfulness programmes, and emotional intelligence training, and by encouraging a more collaborative climate. Clear communication from school leaders about reforms and about teachers’ rights and responsibilities could also reduce uncertainty.
They acknowledge several limitations, including the imbalance between men and women, reliance on self-reported answers, and a cross-sectional design that cannot establish cause and effect. Some of the questionnaire subscales also showed weak reliability, so future studies with larger and more balanced samples are needed.
