Resource Approach to Overcoming Teachers’ Professional and Daily Difficulties

Abstract

The dynamically changing modern world brings various professional and everyday difficulties. Educators, who per-form a noble and socially important mission of preparing the younger generation for adult life, deserve special attention as they experience professional stagnation and emotional burnout. The theoretical analysis of literature source and the results of empirical studies suggest that the determinants of subjective experience in coping with difficult life situations, stress, and risks of change, are social and life experience, traditions, factors of the socio-cultural environment, and personal psychophysiological characteristics. At the same time, the effectiveness of the techniques that people use to cope with difficulties can obviously be different. The methodological approach in the article substantiates the resource approach. The article theoretically substantiates and empirically verifies the protective-adaptive process of teachers’ coping with difficulties. It was found that there are four stages of responding to difficulties as part of the protective and coping strategy. It was experimentally proved that teachers demonstrate a reduced level of resilience and tolerance to uncertainty, which is characterized as an insufficient degree of resource provision; that most often teachers turn to social support, to their own strengths and knowledge, and to work as the means of psychological and coping protection; that most teachers are not ready to accept risk, change, and self-change; and at the same time, they demonstrate a rather high level of emotional burnout, a critically high level of stress, and reduced performance. To preserve the health of teachers as a professional group and to enhance their life resources and vitality, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of coping behaviour, to train teachers to accept changes, and to develop a repertoire of coping strategies and conscious coping behaviour based on the resource approach.