Personal Resilience as a Predictor of Professional Development Engagement and Career Satisfaction of Agriscience Teachers

Abstract

The profession of teaching is inherently stressful. Resilience, or the ability to adapt and develop competence despite exposure to disruptive change, has been shown to be beneficial for teachers. The purpose of this study was to determine if personal resilience is a predictor of professional development engagement and career satisfaction of agriscience teachers. A census of agriscience teachers in four purposefully selected states was taken. Data were collected using the TailoredDesign Method, using multiple points of contact with multiple modes to minimize survey error. The overall response rate was 72.5% (n = 892). The linear combination of independent variables in a stepwise backwards regression model explained 13.7% of the variance of professional development engagement and 21.4% of the variance of career satisfaction. These findings suggested that increasing the resilience of agriscience teachers, specifically in the areas of positive: world and focused, could lead to increased engagement in professional development and career satisfaction, which has been shown to be a factor that increases teacher efficacy. Additional research is needed to explore how to increase the resilience of agriscience teachers and the relationship between teacher resilience and student outcome variables.