Teachers' stress and professional learning A day-to-day and teacher-to-teacher investigation

To keep pace with rapid societal changes, teachers must continuously invest time and effort in professional development. Yet, teaching is a demanding profession that often involves substantial work-related stress, which may influence teachers’ engagement in professional learning activities. In this study, we collected data from 151 secondary school teachers over 15 consecutive workdays to examine how work-related stress relates to both the quality and quantity of their professional learning. Drawing on previous literature, we hypothesized that higher levels of stress would be linked to lower commitment to professional development activities, both between teachers and on a day-to-day basis. The findings were partly contradictory. While cross-sectional measures indicated that increased stress tends to lower engagement in professional learning, the daily measures presented a more nuanced scenario, showing that stress does not always act as a barrier and may sometimes even coincide with heightened effort. These results underscore the importance of considering both overarching beliefs about the teaching profession and the specific time frames used to capture stress and learning. Ultimately, this study suggests that stress, depending on the context, can both impede and potentially stimulate teachers’ professional growth, emphasizing the need for carefully chosen measurement intervals and more refined interpretations of stress in educational practice.