Chapter 3: Building Professional Resilience Professional Wellness is not a term commonly associated with teachers. For years we have been grappling with the issue of ‘teacher stress’ — mostly unsuccessfully due to our focus on reactively trying to ‘fix’ the problem rather than proactively addressing the cause. A number of articles related to the issue of stress and burnout are appended at the end of this section for your information. Professional Resilience however is a term which refers to a teacher’s capacity to be able to both survive and thrive in a highly demanding professional environment. In order to be able to best assist students with their learning we need to be able to sustain our own resilience at both a personal and professional level. Teaching is an extremely difficult profession which is, at the same time, incredibly exciting. The opportunity to be able to shape young minds is a challenging blessing in itself with some of the extremely difficult situations we have to face these days. The opportunity to expand our own learning in the context of that of our students is also a wonderful experience. At the same time however, we do know that there are similar issues which face teachers generally and which we can address. Below is a framework which describes a number of elements which are necessary for Professional Resilience. This is not an exhaustive list, but it will provide you with the beginnings of a ‘self-review’ of how you are dealing with each of these aspects. Each aspect is considered separately in more detail throughout this manual.
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(C) Creating Resilient Educators
