Learning to self-regulate the professional work outside the classroom: A resource for novice teachers?

Abstract

Workload stress is a significant challenge for many novice teachers, often resulting in increased turnover intentions. This longitudinal quasi-experiment, involving 189 novice teachers, investigates whether brief cognitive self-regulation training (two 4-h training sessions) can improve coping with workload stress (indicated by reduced emotional exhaustion and increased leisure satisfaction, assessed by questionnaire). Results from latent true change models show that improved cognitive self-regulation strategy use can positively affect emotional exhaustion (at follow-up) and leisure satisfaction (at post-test and follow-up). The study results should encourage teacher educators to include such interventions in teacher induction to mitigate teacher attrition.