Reciprocal and Dynamic Relationships of Teachers’ Personal Resources, Work Engagement, and Instructional Quality: A Resource-Oriented Approach

Teachers are at risk of experiencing high levels of stress at work, which lead to health impairments. This is likely to affect the core task in teachers’ everyday work lives, planning and providing effective instruction for students, and, thus, their performance. Therefore, building resources among teachers is highly relevant, not only for teachers themselves but also for schools, students, and our society. The aim of this project is to take a resource-oriented approach by investigating reciprocal and dynamic relationships between personal resources and positive work-related outcomes among biology and mathematics teachers. By building on the Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll, 1989) and the Job-Demands-Resources-model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007), this project will contribute to our understanding of the interplay between professional knowledge and teacher efficacy, on the one hand, and work engagement and instructional quality, on the other hand. We include general as well as domain-specific manifestations of these key variables in our study. Occupational health research has so far rarely studied knowledge or skills as personal resources in the context of the JDR-model. Educational research has investigated the relationship between teachers’ professional knowledge, teacher efficacy, and instructional quality in different projects yielding, however, different results. In this study, we expand educational models by including (1) work engagement as a mediator between teachers’ personal resources and their instructional quality and by capturing (2) teacher efficacy with a domain-specific approach to provide a more comprehensive insight into the role of teacher efficacy. Furthermore, many studies have focused on how personal resources affect a teacher’s quality of instruction but, not vice versa, on how the quality of instruction affects personal resources among teachers. Thus, we will investigate reciprocal relationships between study variables that are prone to change from one week to another (teacher efficacy, job resources, work engagement, and instructional quality). To draw conclusions regarding the generalizability of findings, we study the interplay of key variables in two samples of biology and mathematics teachers. We will apply a micro-longitudinal design with weekly measurements over eight consecutive working weeks. Furthermore, we will combine self-report and objective data collected through subjective ratings and classroom observations for the measurement of instructional quality. We will implement multilevel and growth modeling to investigate static and dynamic relationships between our study variables and their development over time. By understanding processes that influence work engagement and instructional quality among teachers, we aim to identify starting points for future interventions that promote work-related well-being and performance.