Secondary Teachers’ Perspectives of Work related Stress and Resilience

Abstract

The current situation is a national teacher shortage resulting from growing teacher stress in work environments that do not support their basic psychological needs. In a national survey of schools in the U.S., at least 60% of school districts reported teacher shortages (Buttner, 2021). At the same time, a study on teacher attrition said that 50% of teachers intend to leave the profession (Rasanen et al., 2020). The most cited reasons for leaving the teaching profession include work demands and student discipline problems, which are also known sources of teacher stress (Abos et al., 2019b; Camacho & Parham, 2019; Coyle et al., 2020; Fitchett et al., 2021; Li et al., 2021; Rasanen et al., 2020). Teacher stress may be the primary cause of teacher shortages. Understanding teachers’ experiences with stress is essential to creating strategies that reduce their stress, burnout, and attrition, and few studies have focused on secondary school teachers’ stress in the U.S. (Lizana et al., 2021). Growing teacher shortages are further compounded by the decreasing quality of life and well-being reported by teachers, following the pandemic, due to work-related stress (Alves et al., 2020; Buttner, 2021; Lizana et al., 2021)