The perceptions of educational administrators and teachers about the use of resilience to achieve

excellence in school community

Introduction to the Problem
The term resilience has its origin on the Latin, resilio that means to go back, return from a
jump, highlight, and bounce. Resilience is a concept with a huge potential for all professionals
working in the field of education, allowing systematize and put into practice what you do on a
daily basis for the welfare of the children. For education the term implies positive dynamics, a
capacity to return forward. Human resilience is not limited to resist, it allows the reconstruction
meaningful and productive life.
Resilience is proposed as a pragmatic definition, which sinks its roots in the educational,
therapeutic, and social realities. Here are some definitions according to various authors:
1. The ability to emerge from adversity, adapt, recover, and access a meaningful life and
productive (BICE,1994).
2. The universal human capacity to deal with the adversities of life, overcome them and
even be transformed positively by them (Grotberg,1995).
3. The development of skills despite the adversity (Egeland, Carlson and Sroufe, 1993).
In definition, resilience distinguishes two components: the resistence against destruction,
i.e. the capacity to protect their own integrity under pressure and beyond the resistance, the
capacity to forge a positive vital behavior despite the difficult circumstances. The concept also
includes the ability of a person or social system to properly deal with the difficulties in a way
which is socially acceptable.

Resilience is a process, a harmonized set of phenomena, in which the subject slips into an
emotional, social, and cultural context. It is the art of sailing in torrents (Cyrulinik, 2002).

Resilience speaks about a combination of factors that allow a child, a human being to confront
and overcome the problems and adversities of life (Suarez, 1995).
Background of the Study
The issue of the resilience is a very important and it discussed in the last decades of the
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States, Europe and other countries, and in
Puerto Rico for less than a decade. Resilience is defined as the human capacity to cope with
life's adversities, overcome and even be transformed positively by them (Groetberg, 1995) is a
relatively new discussion topic in Puerto Rico, but mostly its a rather innovative issue and it has
entered the educational realm from the field of psychology. This theme aims to explain the
phenomena characteristic of a school in the light of human behavior and the different definitions
that have been given to this concept. The literature goes far beyond because it places the school
administrator as the spearhead in the educational scenario in Puerto Rico in terms of promoting
resilience, in order to create a school climate conducive to the development of an education that
drives the interest, the innovation, the acceptance and the challenges the student as the essential
part of Puerto Rican schools system.
Problem Statement
The absence of the use of resilience in the educational environment is already a serious
problem in Puerto Rico. If one doesn't help the student overcome their situations on their own,
he/she himself will not be successful in their studies. Therefore when he/she faces a negative
circumstance he/she will want to leave the studies because he/she will not have the capacity to
resist, tolerating the pressure or the obstacles despite these to do the right thing. In Puerto Rico
dropout statistics are extremely high. According to the statistics presented by the Department of
Education of Puerto Rico dropout rate for academic year 2010-2011 ranged from 30% and 40%

(House of Representatives, 2012). An investigation related to the use of resilience is significant

and of very much benefit for the education of today and tomorrow as it is a concept that
combines psychological, social, emotional, cognitive, cultural, ethnic, with many more
ingredients.
School is an important part of the development of resilience in the school community
since in it they spend most of the hours of the day. The social problems and crises being
experienced today in Puerto Rico is attributed largely to the lack of communication. It is
important to have a good relationship with close family, friends and other people. When the
human accept the help and support of loved ones is strengthened resilience.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to probe the point of view of education managers and faculty
regarding the utilization of resilience to attain a school community of excellence. This
investigation approach rests upon prior investigations, thus reducing the investigative efforts in
terms of identifying the needs and feasibility of such study. Generally, people can be successful
in social conditions that tax their empathy thresholds, interchange affections, interact, maintain
their balance with humor, face problems, engage in self-analysis to better known themselves and
to avoid detrimental and hostile environments (Sigman, 2010). Pratt (2005) stated that a school
community is a group of human beings that influences, is influenced by the education conditions,
and helps each other to attain agreed upon objectives.

Research Questions

The study is geared toward two research questions based on qualitative research. The specific
qualitative research questions based in the phenomenological design is:
1. What are the perceptions of educational administrators and teachers in K-12 schools
regarding the use of resilience to achieve school community?
The specific quantitative research question based in the causal comparison design is:
2. What is the difference between the perceptions of educational administrators regarding
the use of resilience to achieve school community compared to the perceptions of
teachers?
Significance of the Study
In recent years, the study and promotion of resilience among students and educators have
been considered as an effective tool to address the needs of individuals and the school
community (Negron, 2009; Munist & Santos, 2011; Henderson, & Mapp, 2002). Students and
teachers increasingly face a multitude of stressors that include the typical rapid changes that
nowadays affects all nations.