Teacher stress, well-being, and adaptation to innovation

Teachers face many sources of stress; however, a consistent source is prompted by the need to cope with change as districts adapt to shifting paradigms. This study intended to fill Rogers’ (2003) KAP gap and the failure of innovations by infusing the study of well-being and emotion into the narrative by incorporating the transactional relationship between technostress and implementation efforts into the technochange process. The study investigated teachers’ cognitive appraisals of technochange (primary appraisal) and their adaptational coping processes (secondary appraisal) to understand how implementation impacts teachers’ well-being and their adaptive processes. A parallel convergent mixed methods approach with an embedded survey design was used to investigate the appraisals of teachers coping with technochange. Data was collected via an online survey from a population of Southern California teachers in a single district resulting in a sample of 27 participants. Appraisals were investigated through open-ended items which enabled teachers to provide narrative responses generating thematic findings based on Lazarus and Folkman’s Transactional Model of Stress, Appraisal, and Coping and the environmental context features of educational technology implementation developed by the EdTech Evidence Exchange and Genome Project. Secondary appraisals were measured using the eight subscales of Folkman and Lazarus’ (1988a) Ways of Coping Questionnaire. The findings revealed teachers often appraise new technologies as a threat or harmful to their well-being suggesting that implementation may lead to maladaptive outcomes. Threat-based appraisals were associated with violations to commitments, ambiguity regarding the change effort, a lack of professional development, a lack of support, and negative emotions. The findings also revealed that the majority of teachers used problem-focused coping strategies involving the social context suggesting teachers face more problems than challenges when it comes to technochanges. Therefore, it was concluded that adaptational outcomes depend on the management and enframing the technochange. Challenge appraisals can be achieved by creating conditions for teacher agency through targeted implementation systems and processes that emphasize strategic leadership support, professional learning, and functional infrastructure and operations. Future research could explore the conditions that cause appraisals to change or investigate the adaptational outcomes related to specific district implementation strategies, policies, processes, and procedures.