Enhancing Teachers’ Resilience through Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

Many studies have proven that teacher resilience is one of the fostering factors of teacher commitment to stay in their teaching career. Although many studies have been conducted around the topic of teacher resilience, there is still a gap in the literature on what teacher professional development was done by resilient teachers that contributed to their decision to stay in their careers. In filling the void, this narrative inquiry-designed research aimed at understanding the experiences and perceptions of teachers considered resilient in their teaching career's early years. In-depth interviews were done with four Indonesian teachers to answer two research questions: (1) What features of teacher professional development (TPD) learning activities in which resilient teachers participate? (2) What are teachers’ perceptions about their TPD? The findings show that the teachers undertook both formal and informal TPD programs, such as seminars and webinars, courses and workshops, dialogue with other teachers, observation visits to other schools, and professional literature reading. The teachers believe that teaching is their calling which makes them committed to the teaching profession. And TPD programs are believed to be the supportive factors of their resilience because they equip the teachers with the skills, knowledge, and understanding that they need to tackle teaching constraints.