In my master's thesis, I researched how an educator develops professionally when experiencing and solving stressful professional situations, and how his resilience is built in the process. The purpose of the research is to determine whether the educator's assessment of professional competence can be related to the possibility of reducing the number of situations that the educator experiences as stressful. The topics I covered in my research are the recognition of stressful professional situations and the stressfulness of the teaching profession, preventive action to avoid stress and the development of resilience, stress factors in connection with experiencing violence against an educator and the professional development of an educator. In the theoretical part, I initially defined the profession of an educator and the stressfulness of his profession, as well as the importance of the professional development of pedagogical workers, where I described the term itself and models of professional development. In the following, I defined the concept of stress, its occurrence, consequences, and the importance of reducing stress. I devoted a special chapter to professional stress, i.e., stress that occurs at the workplace or it arises because of work influences on the individual. I also defined the concept of resilience and described the importance of this quality for an individual's coping with stress and listed the component parts of resilience.
138 educators and assistant educators from kindergartens across Slovenia were included in the empirical research, who responded to an online questionnaire. It was created for research purposes. A causal non-experimental method of pedagogical research and a quantitative research approach were used. The research showed that educators experience their work and professional role as quite stressful, and they cite cooperation with parents as the most stressful area of their work. During the research, we found that educators experience most elements of pedagogical work as quite stressful. The symptoms of stress that the educators experienced most often were feeling overwhelmed and tired, lack of energy and exhaustion, as well as anxiety, tension and worry. According to most educators, these symptoms have little effect on their ability to perform their daily work. When researching stress factors, educators cited the compliance with new measures related to the Covid-19 epidemic as the most stressful factor, while educators experience the level of responsibility they have in their work, administrative work, low status of the teaching profession in society, noise at work and relationships with parents as very stressful. One of the stress factors that educators experience at their workplace is also violence, which most often occurs in the form of psychological violence. When experiencing stressful professional situations, the research showed that educators in their first year of employment experienced more stressful professional situations than they experience today. They also decided with a large majority that when dealing with stress and solving stressful professional situations, the individual develops professionally. The research showed that educators feel qualified enough to deal with stress at work independently, they also think similarly about the development of their own resilience, which, according to the majority, is sufficiently developed to effectively help them deal with stressful work situations. We found that most educators attach great importance to individual resilience when dealing with stress at work, and they take care of its development themselves, as they know the component parts of resilience, to which they attach great importance. Almost all the educators questioned judged that experiencing and solving stressful situations at the workplace affects the development of their resilience, and at the same time, they cite several positive effects that they gain from experiencing stressful situations. When investigating the influence of professional competence, professional satisfaction, and the climate in the organization on experiencing stress at the workplace and building individual resilience, we found that all of the listed factors have an influence on how many situations at the workplace the educators will experience as stressful and how they will thus be developing their resilience.
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