Chapter 12: Understanding Teacher Stress in an Age of Globalization

What aspects of teacher stress, coping, and stress prevention are associated with the school and classroom context? What aspects of teacher stress, coping, and stress prevention are associated with stable personality traits? What aspects of teacher stress, coping, and stress prevention are malleable, teachable skills, and therefore responsive to psycho-educational processes? The answers to these questions are likely to emerge only through the interaction between the development of richer theoretical models and more complex research designs. Much of the current teacher stress research is conducted with convenience samples, in well-researched settings, using a narrow range of self-report measures. While such studies capitalize on the centrality of perceptions in our current understanding of the processes that lead to the subjective experience of occupational stress for teachers, the field will be advanced by more particularized theoretical definitions of the specific coping strategies that are most useful in a variety of classroom settings and situations. As our research designs include more classroom observations and purposeful sampling from teachers in varying contexts and with varying degrees of healthy, functional appraisals of the demands and resources involved in the teaching process, a more particularized understanding of both the emotion-and problem-focused coping strategies that are effective with particular subgroups of students can emerge.