How to Build Resilient Teachers: An Interview with Aaron Nydam, EdD

This article is the first in a series of long-form interviews with individuals working in RSC's Regional Hubs who have unique experiences and perspectives in rural education. RSC's Program Manager, Henry Whitehead, sat down with Dr. Aaron Nydam. Aaron is a lifelong educator who was a graduate student at Teton Science Schools, and recently completed his EdD at the University of Wyoming (both organizations within RSC's Northern Rockies Hub). His dissertation focused on building teacher resiliency, and he shares the highlights from his research below.

Henry: Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up, how did you become an educator, and what experiences informed your passion for education?

I grew up in South Denver riding my bike and playing basketball with my two brothers. I was also blessed with incredibly supportive parents. In terms of becoming an educator it was a progression of a couple factors: First, I thrived on meaningful connections, despite not being a social kid. My friends came through shared experiences over time in sports or on adventures. This led me into roles such as coaching and becoming a camp counselor.

Second, I became increasingly passionate about the natural world from when I was young up to this very moment. I cannot stop sharing all that I learn. Becoming a biology teacher seemed to be a clear fit. I remember coming back to visit my high school during college and having my former principal ask me if I had considered becoming an educator. At that point, I really hadn't. From that moment, I have not stopped becoming an educator.

The list of experiences informing my passion for education is long. Collectively they all, in some form, reveal potential for transformation. I will share that my greatest growth and formation as an educator came early in my career as a graduate student at Teton Science Schools. It was there that I also began to think more critically and creatively about what teaching and learning could look like.

How did teacher resilience become the focus of your research? Why is that such an important topic, in Wyoming and beyond?

It’s always a great exercise to step back and consider how we arrived somewhere. Arriving at this topic of teacher resilience is certainly a confluence of personal and professional trajectories. I will say that my graduate school journey has been an opportunity to really consider the lived experience of teachers. It was also an extended reflection of my own journey and others’ through the lens of learning theory, a lot of sense-making.

I started my doctorate targeting teacher education alongside Covid-19. Needless to say, the resulting statistics on teacher attrition grabbed my attention. I remember the day when I read that 65% of public school teachers in Wyoming would quit if they could, a survey conducted by one of my professors (Perkins, 2022). Nationally, more than half of teachers said they were more likely to leave education (GBAO, 2022). Not only were teachers at the center of heated political issues, teachers were increasingly isolated from critical support systems and abruptly forced to step into new professional domains without feelings of competency (Drane et al., 2020).

Amid all the problem-solving following the pandemic, my questions began to shift toward who was thriving and how. By examining the lived experiences of effective, committed teachers, could we advance the development of teacher resilience?

I describe teacher resilience as a dynamic, multidimensional phenomenon amid adversity leading to positive outcomes— teachers and their environments interacting over time to produce engagement, growth, commitment, enthusiasm, satisfaction, and well-being. Ultimately, I subscribe to the assertion that if education is to be a successful social and economic investment, the well-being, engagement, motivation, and resilience can neither be assumed nor taken for granted (Lauchlan et al., 2012).

I like that you define resilience as a collection of skills or competencies to be developed over time within context, rather than a static or innate quality. Can you provide a high-level overview of your findings?

Interviews with committed, engaged educators across rural Wyoming revealed that teacher resilience is not a fixed personal trait but a developmental process sustained by five mutually reinforcing factors: professional purpose, professional relationships, contextual understanding, productive adaptability, and competency development. None operate in isolation; together they enable teachers to thrive over time within their particular contexts.

1. Professional Purpose - First, the teachers I interviewed continually reconnect to why they teach. They hold a strong commitment to students, align daily practice with core values, and find pride in long-term impact. As one teacher put it, “When you see students blooming— building confidence— that keeps me going.” Teachers spoke to the pride felt when working in alignment with one’s values: “I think (purpose) is so important, and I think that's the center of my resilience, because honestly, when you guide the students, you see the growth instead of you being out in front, leading them… that's why I teach.”

Purpose acts as fuel; when external pressures rise, value alignment sustains pride and fulfillment.

2. Professional Relationships - No one thrives alone. Resilient educators battle isolation and embed themselves in supportive networks of colleagues, mentors, and administrators. Psychological safety, approachable leaders, and authentic collegial support matter in the long term. As one participant said, “The most resilient teachers are the ones who can walk into a partner’s room and have an honest conversation.” Another shared, “Well, the 1st thing [is that] I've had mentors here, peer mentors, [who are] approachable, nonjudgmental… They are happy to help you succeed, because if you're succeeding, they see themselves succeeding. So, we're working together... No question is too trivial.”

Teachers consistently highlighted the critical importance of connection with administrators and leadership: “I think the biggest factors for that would be having safe communities where everyone feels like they can discuss and talk and have the support of the admin… that support and trust is the biggest factor in teacher resilience.”

At the heart of this relational dimension of resilience is how teachers avoid feelings of isolation and navigate the inherent tensions between connection and vulnerability, and collaboration and autonomy.

3. Contextual Understanding - Resilience deepens as teachers identify and understand the systems and communities they serve. They adapt practice to cultural norms, community values, and shifting policies. One educator noted, “Education has changed markedly in the last ten years… resilience involves adapting your skill-set and withstanding change.”

Resilient teachers also invest in the local community. A participant described one of her most committed colleagues, “She understands the values of that ranching community. And she takes those five to ten kids and builds an education that really speaks to them. And she'll be there until her husband retires, right? Whereas we've had other teachers out there who have to drive 45 minutes to get to work every day and they don't understand why all of the kids were late for school… But (she) understands. She goes with the flow in education.”

Systems thinking, cultural humility, and community connection turn resistance into responsiveness.

4. Productive Adaptability - Adaptability is not reactive but deliberate. Resilient teachers reframe challenges, focus on what they can control, and avoid personalization. As one teacher shared, resilience involves “How (teachers) respond, the meaning that they make (of adversity). And, I think I suffered from that in my own experience. I made it personal when classes didn't go well, it was about my failure... It was about me.”

Productive adaptability also involves regulating emotions and targeting the positive: “You can't be emotionally reactive, because when you're emotionally reactive in education, it's just hard in every way. So, just being able to be pretty level with your reactions and not take things too personally.” Another added, “Finding the humor helps me stay resilient and keep pushing forward.”

Productive adaptability keeps purpose and agency intact amid change.

5. Competency Development - Resilient teachers see themselves as capable and evolving professionals. They reflect, iterate, and focus on “tiny wins.” As one put it, “Resilience is not just to keep going, but to get better. Look at why a lesson flopped, try again, change it, and find what works for these students.”

Another illustrated the importance of self-belief, describing that “A lot of your personal resilience comes down to the moment when you don't feel like you're capable, but you decide, you make a decision to address it. Are you to approach it, to engage that challenge versus another option…. okay, the kids are capable, but I don't feel I don't believe I'm capable of getting them there. I'm not the right person… I need to find another job.”

Resilient teachers believe they are “works in progress”. Self-efficacy and growth mindset promote feelings of competence, reinforcing resilience over time.

Figure: Visual Model of Teacher Resilience in Rural-serving Schools of Wyoming

How might these five factors or competencies scaffold or be developed over time?

When we talk about teacher resilience, it’s important not to frame it solely as a set of skills for teachers to master. That person-focused view can unintentionally burden teachers and overlook the environments in which they work. While the teacher’s experience is where resilience is enacted, it is co-constructed — resilience develops through the interaction of teachers and their contexts. It is up to teacher education programs and school leaders to amplify the conditions that enable resilience.

While many efforts are already happening in schools, research suggests resilience scaffolds through integrated, growth-oriented preparation and support. I believe that the five key promotive factors must be cultivated across a teacher’s career:

Professional Purpose – We can embed purpose formation and reflection throughout an educator's career, helping them continually clarify and evaluate their motivations and core values. Particularly, ongoing professional development should prompt reflection, help teachers connect and realign when external demands conflict with their values, and offer emotional support for purpose-driven work. Schools can also reinforce purpose and promote pride by authentically recognizing impact that aligns with professional purpose through meaningful feedback and public celebration — particularly vital in rural settings where informal affirmation may be limited.

Professional Relationships – We need to prepare teachers to intentionally build and sustain growth-fostering relationships. Programs should prioritize relational skills — collaboration, boundary-setting, empathy — and ensure access to mentorship, especially in rural placements. Schools and districts can support ongoing collaboration and psychological safety through peer learning communities and connections to broader professional networks.

Contextual Understanding – We need to equip teachers with systems thinking, place-conscious practice, and cultural responsiveness tailored to rural realities. Preparation should include field experiences that surface real challenges such as limited resources and professional isolation, alongside strategies for adapting to local policy, community values, and student needs. Professional learning should remain locally relevant and strengthen adaptive expertise.

Productive Adaptability – We need to foster adaptive mindsets, emotional regulation, and values-based decision-making through reflection, scenario-based learning, and moving beyond instructional coaching. Early-career teachers may need support with boundary-setting and stress management, while experienced educators benefit from renewal and leadership pathways that sustain agency.

Competency Development – Frame professional growth as an ongoing journey. Teacher preparation should normalize learning through challenges and build self-efficacy and growth mindset (Bandura, 1986; Dweck, 2016). Rural schools should ensure early-career mentorship, differentiated professional development, and recognition systems that validate evolving expertise and affirm teachers’ professional identity (Brunetti & Marston, 2018; Lemon & McDonough, 2023).

Finally, I need to emphasize that, once again, educational leaders play the pivotal role. They can strengthen resilience by building trust through authentic relationships, protecting teachers’ autonomy to adapt, involving them in decision-making, creating psychologically safe environments, reducing isolation through mentorship and networks, and celebrating growth and impact.

It strikes me that teachers must have agency over developing those competencies. Do you have favorite examples that you’ve seen of teachers empowering themselves to build resilience?

Yes—agency is central. The literature is pretty clear; resilient teachers take action in a manner that fits their context and aligns with their values. In my interviews, teachers described a variety of strategies within each theme:

First, micro-rituals anchor teachers' meaning and sense of purpose. One teacher deliberately walks past student-made artifacts (birdhouses, benches, signs) when his motivation dips—visible reminders that “we actually did something, beyond test scores”.

And whether it's a buddy bench or bird houses or some motivational signs like there are, there is physical evidence that I have tried to make the school a better place. And it's up on the walls, and the kids still remember, when I talk about them, they ask ‘Do you remember when we made those bird boxes? Do you remember when we built that bench? Do you remember those signs?’ That is the concrete evidence, the physical reminder of how we actually did something! It’s not the abstract [construct] that I helped a kid learn how to read.

Second, resilient teachers counter isolation with intentional connections with other professionals inside and outside of the school walls. Even when support is available, it may be disconnected from the realities of the rural teaching context. Teachers in rural schools can’t rely on leadership for practical, context-specific advice. As one teacher shared:

Usually in a regular school, you'd be working with your grade level team or your subject area team, who'd kind of be telling you what you needed to do as you went along, and what was expected. But not having anyone else here, that's just totally lost if you leave.

Across the board, all participants described trusted interactions with colleagues for “authentic conversations” to create a sense of mutuality, normalizing struggle, shifting shame to pride, and fueling problem-solving, “There's no room to close your door anymore. I mean, in that particular sense of like, ‘We gotta be here for each other’. Otherwise, it's just too hard.”

More uniquely, participants delivered the clear message to teachers entering the profession: learn the place and teach to it. While a rural-serving context provides many challenges, participants were quick to frame it as an opportunity to make teaching and learning more meaningful. For example, a teacher described how she uses her professional autonomy to design standards-aligned, hands-on, multi-grade learning that fits remote realities—both engaging for students and renewing for teachers:

Given the remoteness of (our town) and the multigrade nature, I have a lot of latitude in terms of like, well, ‘How are you gonna approach that?’ Like, here are some resources, and here is our curriculum, which is a resource, you know. Use it, parts of it. And I just feel like that gives me so much freedom in terms of creativity and creating a meaningful setting both for myself and students. I think that for me, it keeps things moving in a resilient direction… But it looks different out here.

Professional autonomy enables teachers to design meaningful, student-centered experiences, which not only enhances engagement but also sustains their own motivation and sense of purpose. Recognizing and adapting to the unique opportunities and constraints of their rural context allows teachers to be resilient, even as expectations may differ in other settings.

In relation to productive adaptability. The teachers I interviewed plan for predictable stress; they “turn into skid.” Resilient teachers appear to expect friction; they respond; they don’t react:

Finals week, (I write) a reminder for myself that students were gonna hate me this week… this is predictable, and rather than me, having like this really downtrodden, depressing kind of week, I am proactive about it… Hey, you should remind yourself that kids are going to hate you next week, and it's okay. And we know this, and we're prepared for it… the resilience comes with starting to prepare yourself in a different way.

Another teacher described how teacher resilience involves acts of discernment:

There's a big difference between problems, right? And we have some students that have trouble discerning between big and small problems. Well, we have adults that have trouble discerning between big and small problems. But you've got to be able to be resilient. You have to. You have to be able to make that distinction and say, you know what it's not worth the hassle, it's not worth the fuss. It's not worth worrying about. I don't control it. Whatever versus, yeah, this is important. This I need to deal with. And I need to stick this out. There's definitely situations that, “Oh, yeah, this is not the hill I'm dying on today. I'm not fighting this battle today.” It's really in the grand scheme of things. Meh, it's not a big deal.

Values must drive decision-making, “And if you don't have that perspective, then everything is a hill to die on, and it's overwhelming. So, you have to decide. You know, how important is XYZ to you versus ABC? Because it's all coming at you today.” Values, instead of urgency, drive resilient action.

Finally, my study’s findings suggest that resilient teachers assess capacity to manage demands and actively cultivate self-efficacy through continuous professional growth, reflective practice, and an acknowledgment of both their strengths and areas for improvement. According to one participant, developing teacher resilience requires a deliberate approach with authentic experiences leading to increased confidence and faith in their work:

Well, it's the same as teaching stamina for students. So, you know you have to build up (teacher’s) self-confidence, right? And so, part of it is them having the faith that they know what they're doing. And so, how do you teach them that? By giving them those valid experiences, right? And by using challenges and setbacks as a learning point, not as a personal attack and so that still would be.

Notably, this type of self-questioning reflects a sense of responsibility and also the vulnerability that can undermine self-belief early in a teacher’s career. However, it is also a starting point for learning and growth.

Of course, on the flip side of the question of agency is that teachers often operate within rigid, stressful, and underfunded systems that carry a lot of inertia. What are some concrete ways that districts, non-profits, universities, foundations, and other educational institutions can support teacher resilience?

Thanks for asking. Teacher resilience can’t be another thing we ask individual teachers to figure out on their own. It’s a collective undertaking, a shared responsibility — schools, districts, universities, nonprofits, and funders all shape the contexts in which teachers work in. When those systems become increasingly aligned in purpose toward building teacher resilience, my findings suggest that they will better enable resilience; the moves are surprisingly practical.

For districts, we must promote a relational form of school leadership that demonstrates personal investment, builds trust, and fosters authentic connection. Relational leadership is about visibility, accessibility, and those small but sincere acts—such as personal check-ins or delivering messages of appreciation— which strengthen teacher morale and establish a higher degree of psychological safety in which teachers can voice concerns or seek help without fear of judgment.

Related to this is the need to increase continuity of school leadership. Frequent administrative turnover and instability disrupts relational trust and school culture. When leadership changes are unavoidable, prioritize smooth transitions, clear communication, and continuity of supportive practices.

Findings suggest that educational leaders can cultivate resilience-promoting school cultures by developing systems that increase collegiality, collaboration, and mutual support among staff to counter isolation, especially in geographically dispersed schools. This type of resilience culture would proactively affirm teacher professionalism and communicate trust in teachers’ judgment, provide structured, contextually responsive mentorship and support systems over the arc of a teacher's career.

For example, could we pair every new teacher with a mentor who understands the local context and can offer real-world advice in rural settings? Educational leaders can recognize impact in ways that matter, such as inviting students and families to share feedback, celebrating small wins publicly, and making teachers’ work visible in the community. A resilience-promoting school culture would value experimentation; encourage “try, learn, adjust” cycles so teachers know it’s okay to test new ideas and grow.

I believe nonprofits can fill critical gaps by helping teachers feel less isolated. That might look like hosting virtual meetups for rural educators, funding teacher-led projects that make learning visible, or supporting place-based curriculum and frameworks so teachers don’t have to start from scratch. Short, skills-based workshops — on things like managing stress, setting boundaries, or navigating conflict — can also give teachers tools they may not get elsewhere.

Universities and teacher preparation programs have an enormous role in setting teachers up for effective and sustainable careers. This means preparing them for the realities of rural-serving schools — through residencies, community-embedded coursework, and systems thinking about how policy, culture, and resources shape their work. It also means explicitly teaching relational competence — how to build networks, ask for feedback, and resolve conflict — alongside a place-based pedagogy. And don’t stop at graduation: create alumni networks or mentoring relationships that continue to develop over time, helping early-career teachers stay connected and reflective.

Foundations and other funders can make a real difference by supporting what teachers consistently say they need but rarely get: stability, access, and recognition. That might mean multi-year funding for mentoring coordinators, travel stipends so rural teachers can join professional networks, or small grants for teacher-led, place-based projects that showcase purpose and impact.

Across all these groups, the through-line is the same: Let’s give teachers time and trust, mentorship and connection, meaningful recognition, and contextually responsive professional learning. In my opinion, these supports must become increasingly integrated and predictable, not one-off. When resilience is designed into the system, teachers won’t have to rely solely on personal grit to stay and thrive.

Thanks for the time, Aaron! This research provides critical insights into what can make or break teacher resiliency, and offers solutions for caring individuals within every niche of rural education ecosystems.

Interview and story series compiled by RSC's Program Manager, Henry Whitehead.