Stress, Burnout, and Resilience: Are Teachers at Risk?

Abstract

It is increasingly common to find alarming news related to tragic events occurring in schools around the world. Being able to deal with these situations without getting hurt is a task not suitable for everyone. In general, teachers are the ones who must deal with this type of situation in addition to other daily problems that appear in any classroom that make the level of stress to which they are subjected can become dangerous. This research aims to know the current situation of teachers in a region of southeastern Spain in terms of their level of work stress, resilience, and other associated variables, for which an ex post facto quantitative approach study was designed. For this purpose, an ad hoc sociodemographic questionnaire, and questions based on the Teaching and Learning International Survey of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the Brief Resilient Coping Scale were applied. The participating sample consisted of 470 teachers. The main findings were that 6% of teachers had burnout (high emotional exhaustion, high cynicism, and low professional effectiveness simultaneously). Resilience correlated inversely with stress, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, excessive teaching, and difficulty maintaining classroom discipline. In conclusion, knowing the needs of teachers allows us to reflect on what kind of prevention and intervention programs are necessary to improve the well-being of teachers and thus improve the quality of education.