ABSTRACT
To teach to one’s best and well each day over three or more decades requires teachers to have a resolute persistence and tenacious commitment to enhancing their students’ learning, well-being, progress and achievements. To sustain such commitment requires an ‘ability to maintain a stable equilibrium’, a positive stable sense of professionalism, a professional identity, and a capacity for resilience, ‘a “frame of mind” that is characterized by the proactive enactment of “positive emotionality”’. Resilience is, therefore, better understood as ‘a resource that goes beyond simply surviving to thriving, flourishing, improved performance, with a potential for increasing job satisfaction, and enhancing commitment, an attribute that among its range of qualities offers the capacity to reflect and grow from adversity. The use of the term ‘everyday resilience’ is premised upon two key research findings about the survival and well-being needs of teachers and the nature of teaching.
