(University of South Australia)

• Studies in the 1980s in Victoria found that around 160 teachers each year were superannuated on the grounds of ill-health. Their average age was 44-45 years and one half to two thirds were retired early because of psychological ill-health; a further one-tenth retired because of stress-related cardiovascular disorder (Otto 1986).
• A big large study into teacher stress in all education sectors in WA (Louden 1987) found that 10 - 20% of the 2138 respondents were experiencing psychological distress, a further 9% were suffering severe psychological distress - in both categories, the proportions found were much greater than for the general population.
• An extensive survey into of teacher workloads and stress done undertaken by the Independent Education Union in Victoria and NSW (IEU 1996) found that teachers reported experiences of stress in a range of areas includingdue to workload pressure, difficulties with management, and poor staff-student relationships. This stress manifested itself in terms of irritability at home (59%) and in class (55%), anxiety (64%) and feelings of powerlessness (45%). Psychosomatic complaints (e.g. chronic fatigue, headaches, shingles, heart palpitations) were reported by 18% of respondents.

• Poor student-teacher relationships which can arise when

• students lack motivation and respect for teachers
• there are classroom behaviour problems
• there is miscommunication or lack of understanding between the teacher and students of different class/ethnic/cultural backgrounds

• Time pressure which can arise when

• there is inadequate time for preparation
• unrealistic demands are made by administrators/managers
• unrealistic deadlines are imposed
• there are issues concerning workload

• Role conflict which can arise when

• there are conflicts among teaching philosophies within the school
• education department policies demand innovation and change
• new roles are required to be undertaken without appropriate training
• administrative demands and paperwork are excessive

• Poor working conditions which can arise when

• there are inadequate facilities and resources

• class sizes are too big
• there are excessive noise levels in the working environment
• the school is geographically isolated

• Lack of control and decision-making power which can arise when

• the bureaucratic structure of school is very hierarchical and power is concentrated in the hands of a few
• there is autocratic leadership

• Poor colleague relationships which can arise when

• there is lack of trust and/or cooperation between colleagues
• there is a competitiveness in the school culture

• Feelings of personal inadequacy which can arise when

• teachers feel incompetent and/or poorly trained
• teachers are required to teach outside their areas of competence and training
• there is inadequate praise and/or recognition for achievement from peers and school leaders

• Extra-organizational stressors which can arise when

• there are poor negative community attitudes towards teachers and schools
• teachers' personal lives and relationships are unstable/insecure

The consequences of teacher stress are also commonly understood (see Sinclair and Ryan 1987, Dinham 1992). From an organizational point of view there is the significant loss of skilled and experienced teachers through resignation and/or premature retirement from all levels of the teaching workforce. Those stressed teachers who stay within the profession, on the other hand, are likely to be increasingly less effective in key areas such as lesson organization, student behaviour management, responsiveness to students and self confidencerelationships with parents (Sinclair and Ryan 1987).

In individual human terms, the costs of teacher stress can be huge and include, impaired health, reduced self confidence and self esteem and damaged personal relationships. If early retirement or resignation is taken, often the consequence is dramatically reduced economic status. On the other hand, in a study of teachers who had resigned from the NSW teaching force, Dinham (1992) found that it was common among those participants who had experienced teaching-related stress to report that these symptoms abated once they had resigned, despite the fact that often their new occupations were also very demanding.

According to Kyriacou (2001), the ways in which individual teachers attempt to cope with stress fall into two main categories: palliative and direct action. Palliative techniques do not deal with the source of the stress but are rather aimed at reducing the impact of the stressor. Many studies that look at how teachers cope with stress (e.g. Sinclair 1992) show how some palliative techniques involve behaviours that are, in the long run, dysfunctional. Such activities as excessive drinking, smoking, and avoidance behaviour, for example, are primarily designed to ease feelings of distress even though these behaviours are not necessarily in the interests of the those with whom the individual teacher is interacting. When palliative techniques fail, teachers often take frequent leave and/or seek medical advice which tends to lead to a regime of medication (Dinham 1992). For those who do cope with stress through palliative techniques, their success is often constructed as an individual disposition or strength bolstered by such 'mental health' strategies as regular exercise, hobbies and relaxation techniques.

Direct action techniques for coping with the stresses of teaching involve attempts to eliminate the sources of stress. Some studies of the way teachers cope with stress (e.g. Borg and Falzon 1990, Cockburn 1996, Benmansour 1998, Kyriacou 2001) indicate that the direct action coping strategies most frequently adopted by teachers include:

• taking action to deal with problems
• keeping feelings under control
• seeking support from colleagues and/or the principal
• having significant adult relationships
• organizing time and prioritising work tasks
• being competent (i.e. thorough lesson preparation; understanding work to be taught).

The concept of resilience emerged, almost by accident, from longitudinal studies of 'at risk' groups of children as they encountered many life stressors during their development, through childhood and adolescence, to adulthood (Werner and Smith 1987; Silva and Stanton 1996). While these were essentially epidemiological studies of the incidence of disease and pathology in the studied populations, interest grew in what Rutter (1990: 181) describes as 'the ubiquitous phenomenon of individual difference in people's responses to stress and adversity'. As Benard (1991: 4) observes:

Later studies focused on specific populations of these children and adolescents (Garmezy 1974; Anthony 1987; Werner and Smith 1988; Garmezy and Rutter 1983). In these studies the subjects were classified as being at risk, yet rather than focusing on those subjects who became casualties of these risk factors, the studies focused instead on those who had not succumbed. The questions this work investigated were:

Instead of focusing on individual deficit, the new approach focused on individual and community strengths and thus, the concept of resilience emerged in the psychological literature

Those characteristics that distinguish 'resilient' from 'non-resilient' young people are referred to as protective factors or protective processes and these can be both internal or external. Internal protective factors include individual skills and orientations such as social competence, problem-solving ability, mastery, autonomy and a sense of purpose and future (see Waters and Sroufe 1983; Garmezy 1985; Rutter 1980; Masten, Best and Garmezy 1990). In relation to children and young people, external protective factors could be found in three main settings: home, school and community. Access to such things as supportive family members (Werner and Smith 1987), safe communities with opportunities for involvement (Pence 1988), schools with good academic records and caring teachers (Rutter et al. 1979) distinguished 'resilient' from 'non-resilient' young people.

These clusters of protective factors were confirmed and extended by our own qualitative research into child and adolescent resilience in South Australia (see Howard and Johnson 1999, 2000a, 2000b; Dryden, Johnson and Howard 1998).

In all our work with children and adolescents, we have identified several key protective factors, some which would be classified as internal and others external. Among the internal protective factors the chief ones have been:

2. a sense of agency or self efficacy (i.e. a belief that you have the ability to determine what happens to you to a large extent)
3. competence or achievement in some area of endeavour

Among the external factors we found the following to be crucially important in resilient children's lives:

6. having someone who takes an interest in you and who cares about what happens to you (e.g. family member, school teacher, club leader, coach)
7. having opportunities to belong to groups or organizations outside the home.

The purpose of this study was to see whether those teachers who seem to be resilient were drawing on the same kinds of protective factors that have been identified in the literature on child and adolescent resilience. In our own work with young people, we have found that many protective factors are very simple, ordinary and even common-place and are often well within the capacities of individuals and organizations to provide. If the protective factors that support resilient teachers are equally simple and ordinary, then teacher education faculties, education bureaucracies, school leadership teams and others with responsibilities for the training care and management of practising teachers can help them avoid the debilitating and painful experiences associated with stress and burn-out.

Drawing on concepts and techniques arising from our work with 'resilient' and 'non-resilient' children (Howard and Johnson 1999, 2000a, 2000b; Dryden, Johnson and Howard 1998), the present study is different from much previous work concerning teacher stress in two important ways:

• First, unlike many of the studies concerning teacher stress and burn-out our study does not adopt a deficit approach. In other words, our focus is on 'what's going right' for teachers successfully coping with stress rather than on 'what's going wrong' for those who are not coping well.
• Second, many previous studies into teacher stress have used self-report questionnaire/surveys of general teaching populations (Kyriacou 2001). In our study we have conducted intensive interviews with individual teachers who are distinguished by their persistent ability to handle successfully teaching situations that are officially recognised as being very stressful.

In our previous work we have developed good relations with a number of primary and secondary schools in the northern region of Adelaide. Many of these schools are located in highly disadvantaged areas where issues of unemployment, poverty, family breakdown and interpersonal violence are common. It is unsurprising then, that the schools in these areas face significant challenges from students and their families on a daily basis and that the teaching environment presents teachers with many potentially stressful experiences. For these reasons, the S.A. South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services Education Department formally classifies many of these schools as 'hard-to-staff'.

We approached the principals in 3 target schools and asked them to identify teachers who were 'at risk' of stress and burn-out, due to the nature of their work, but who were 'resilient' (i.e. they persistently and successfully cope with stress). Ten teachers were identified in this way and they were invited to participate in the study. Of these 10 teachers, 9 were women female and 1 was male. a man. While While this gender breakdown is less than desirable in research terms, these numbers reflect the heavy gender imbalance in the schools approached. For example, in one school only one of the 25 teachers was male.

The participants were interviewed individually using a semi-structured interview schedule. The interviews were audio-taped. The questions we used were as follows:

1. Can you give me a brief summary or overview of your teaching career?

• Where have you been?
• How long were there?
• What year levels have you taught?
• How long have you been at this school?

• What happened?
• What did you do?
• How did you feel?
• How did you deal with your feelings?

5. What are your main sources of support? Who do you talk to?

• At school
• Outside of school

10. What do you think are the most important influences on your resilience?

The tapes were transcribed for analysis using NUD•IST (QSR 1995), the data management software tool.

In our analysis of the interview data, we looked for themes across the transcripts, for similarities and differences and for absences and silences. We also looked for the adult equivalents of the protective factors that we found in our work with young people.

If there was any doubt in our minds about the difficult conditions under which teachers in hard-to-staff schools labour, our respondents dispelled them with calm descriptions of violence and disorder both within the classroom and outside. They all described incidents where children physically attacked other children or teachers by throwing furniture, punching, kicking and biting. Here is an example from Maria provides an example of a physical assault:

Participants also described verbal abuse from children and chronic refusal to comply with reasonable requests. Karen describes this particular kind of stress along with some others too:

As Karen indicates above, other forms of stress involve knowing that some children come to school hungry, poorly dressed and often suffering from all various kinds of abuse and neglect. Here is another example fromAs Leanne comments, dealing with the consequences of abuse and neglect can be stressful:

Although the behaviour and circumstances of children in their classes are sources of stress for all our respondents, it was remarkable that all of them highlight dealing with aggressive, abusive parents as the major stressor. Kim, a principal, described how one child's father undertook an eighteen month-long campaign of intimidation involving regular invasions of the school office, principal's office and/or staff room to hurl abuse and threats. Cathy describes another incident:

Recognising that angry parents pose a significant threat to both teachers and students, the S.A. Government just recently moved to implement legislation empowering school staff and police to remove people 'acting in an offensive and disorderly manner' from school grounds and bar them for up to 3 months.

As with our resilient child and adolescent research subjects, a consistent feature of our participants' talk here in this study was a pervasive sense of agency - a strong belief in their ability to control what happens to them (the opposite of which is fatalism or helplessness). In our teachers, this showed upwas revealed most strongly in the way they chose to respond to the aggression and violence, from either students or parents, which they experienced on an almost daily basis. The key strategy mentioned by all 10 teachers in the three different schools was to depersonalise the unpleasant or difficult events. They did this in a number of ways:

• first, they assessed what had happened and if they felt they had acted appropriately, they chose not to see the event as their fault or to feel guilty about it. Here is Maria talksing about the event with the autistic student described above:

• second, they all acknowledged that there had been occasions when they could have handled things better, but rather than agonise about it they chose to learn from the event and move on. Rob and Teresa provide examples of this:

• third, part of our participants' externalising strategy was to explain the unpleasant events to themselves in ways that sought to understand the offending parent's or student's motivation and circumstances. Maria and Leanne both illustrate this approach:

Another agency-enhancing strategy that 7 of the 10 participants employed concerns what we've termed moral purpose. All of them had chosen to come to teach in hard-to-staff schools. To be sure, for some there had been some career advantage in doing this (i.e. moving from contract to permanent status) but they were all at pains to point out that the challenging nature of their school is what had persuaded them to apply for a position. The chance of 'being able to make a difference' in children's lives and the confidence they could do this was a strong feature of the teachers' talk. Far from being naïve, zealous crusaders, our participants seemed to have a pretty realistic understanding of what and how much they could do.

Teresa echoes this view:

Melissa made the decision to work in her particular school after her final teaching practice which took place in another hard-to-staff-school in the area.

Both the strategy of depersonalising stressful events and the strong moral purpose expressed in their choice of where to teach indicate to us that these teachers have a strong sense of their own agency. They have a clear belief in their ability to affect their own and others' life circumstances and this translates into practice. Importantly, all but two of the teachers in this project indicated that they had learnt the depersonalising strategy either through personal reflection or from more experienced staff with whom they had debriefed after a stressful event.

From our work with children and adolescents we have learnt that resilient individuals have strong connections with others and know that there are people who care about what happens to them. All of our teachers had diverse, caring networks of family and friends outside school (interestingly, only one admitted to having mostly teachers in her social network). All our respondents had caring partners with whom they could talk about their work although most claimed they tried to keep 'dumping their work troubles' on their partners to a minimum. What was particularly interesting in this group of teachers was their unanimous claim of strong support from colleagues and school leadership.

In all three schools the support of principals, deputy principals and school counsellors was evident on a daily basis. Two of the schools had instituted a system of progressive warnings and punishments for non-complying students (the 'Steps' system described by Karen on P. 7 above) in which the final step was the Yellow Card. This was a card the teacher could send to the front office indicating an emergency situation in which the teacher needed immediate assistance. All eight teachers from those two schools were high in their praise for this system and the fact that when a Yellow Card was issued they did get immediate assistance from a member of the leadership team.

Strong caring leadership was also a major source of personal support for all teachers. The following excerpts are typical:

Here Maria describes how the leadership team responded after a particularly distressing incident:

For regular, daily de-briefing about minor issues and incidents all staff turned to trusted colleagues. Here the support seems to be less about solving problems and debriefing about major incidents and more about sharing experiences. Trusted colleagues can boost morale because they know what you are going through and, as Melissa says below, can help 'keep your spirits up'. These excerpts are typical:

All three schools are fairly isolated, being around 25 kilometres from the centre of the city. Of the teachers in this study, none lived in the immediate locality and most lived a considerable distance away, requiring a journey of up to 45 minutes. While in other studies geographic isolation has been a source of stress for teachers, in this study it turned out to be a strength. Several teachers talked about car-pooling with colleagues and how this provided a valuable opportunity to debrief and 'down load' the day before getting home. Those who drove independently also claimed that the long drive home from work was beneficial in so far as it enabled them to calmly go over the day while listening to favourite music. By the time they arrived home they claim they had dealt with any school-related stress.

The final protective factor that we found both in our previous work and in the present study concerns pride in achievement and a sense of one's own competence in areas of personal importance or significance. For these teachers the two factors were often linked. Because they were competent at behaviour management and teaching, their students learnt in orderly classrooms. Because they were patient and good at forging relationships with difficult children, their students made demonstrable progress. Our insights into this dimension of resilience came mainly from asking our participants if there was anything of which they were particularly proud. Here are some of the responses:

When we asked our participants what advice they would give to an inexperienced teacher thinking of applying for a position in a hard-to-staff school they focussed on issues of competence, often reflecting their own strengths in this area:

A sense of agency, a strong support group, pride in achievements and competence in areas of personal importance are all major protective factors and were all strong features of our participants' talk. In terms of Kyriacou's two categories (Kyriacou 2001), our teachers were definitely into Direct Action when it came to handling work-related stress.

We asked our teachers whether they thought their resilience was innate or learnt. Apart from some speculation about whether such qualities as patience might be innate, all our teachers firmly believed they had learnt the strategies and dispositions that made them resilient. Melissa, whose own childhood had been similar to that experienced by many of her students, said she'd learnt her resilience early on and had simply transferred those skills to adult life. Others claimed they had learnt what skills they needed to survive through quiet reflection on their practice (usually when things went wrong). They then developed their coping skills through trial and error. All of them could remember being mentored by some more experienced or senior colleague.

As with our work with children, what we have learnt is that the protective factors that make a real difference in people's lives are earth-shatteringly simple and easy to provide. Here are some of our suggestions:

• The strategy of de-personalising stressful incidents is a simple one that senior staff and colleagues in any school can teach new teachers and that students can be taught in their teacher education courses.
• With School Choice options, principals of hard-to-staff schools can ensure that new staff actually want the challenge of a difficult school - that they have what we've called a moral purpose in their choice of work setting.
• All schools can organize strong and reliable whole-school behaviour management strategies that will support teachers both in everyday and emergency situations.
• Leadership teams in all schools can make support of staff in both professional and personal issues a priority.
• All schools can be organized in such a way as to promote strong peer group support (e.g. work-teams, social activities, supportive rather than competitive school culture). Students in training can be alerted to the importance of developing strong peer support both within school and outside.
• Staff achievements should be celebrated and they should be valued through promotions etc.
• The critical importance of competence in the key areas of behaviour management, program organization, lesson preparation and the effective management of resources can be taught both in teacher education programs and on the job.

Not all schools are hard-to-staff, but all schools present their own particular challenges. Teachers in the 'leafy suburbs' schools are prone to stress and burn-out just as those in disadvantaged areas are - you don't necessarily need to be hit in the face by a 5 year old to doubt whether you are in the right profession! The value of this study is that by researching the extreme case of hard-to-staff schools, valuable strategies for survival for all teachers are identified. We have shown, moreover, that the things that can make a difference to teachers' working lives can be learnt and that those opportunities for learning are easily within the power of individual schools, education bureaucracies and teacher education faculties to provide.