The timing of the study is what gives it scientific weight. Most research on educator stress comes from comparatively benign crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where the threats were epidemiological and logistical rather than physical and existential. During the Israel-Hamas war, educators confronted ongoing security threats, rocket alerts, displacement of families, and profound societal disruption, all while being expected to maintain educational stability for their students. The authors frame this extreme context as a rare natural laboratory for examining how acute, shared trauma interacts with occupational roles and psychological resources—something that peacetime studies simply cannot replicate.

The headline finding concerns role differences. Principals reported significantly greater well-being and lower perceived stress than both teachers and school counselors, while teachers occupied the most precarious position, experiencing the highest stress of any group. This pattern inverts what might naively be expected: principals shouldered ultimate responsibility for school safety, crisis logistics, and communication with families and authorities, yet they emerged as the most psychologically buoyant. Teachers, who maintained daily contact with frightened children while managing their own households and anxieties, absorbed the heaviest psychological toll. The result underscores that the subjective burden of crisis is not a simple function of formal authority or workload, but of how roles position individuals to interpret and manage threat.

Two psychological resources helped explain the gap. Principals and counselors demonstrated higher levels of psychological capital—a positive psychological construct comprising self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience, often abbreviated as PsyCap in the organizational psychology literature—than teachers did. They also reported higher occupational self-efficacy, the belief in one’s capacity to perform the tasks of one’s profession effectively. Psychological capital has been extensively studied since Fred Luthans and colleagues formalized its measurement, and it has repeatedly been linked to lower stress, reduced burnout, and better performance among workers facing adversity. The wartime data suggest that this store of internal resources acts as a buffer precisely when external circumstances offer none.

To test how these variables fit together, the researchers employed path analysis, a structural equation modeling technique that estimates the direct and indirect relationships among a set of variables simultaneously. The analysis confirmed that occupational role, psychological capital, social support, and occupational self-efficacy each predicted both well-being and stress. In other words, the same constellation of resources that boosted psychological flourishing also dampened perceived stress, suggesting that these constructs operate on both sides of the mental health ledger. The dual-outcome design matters because, as prior literature has argued, well-being and distress are related but distinct dimensions—an educator can experience both high stress and preserved well-being, or the reverse—so interventions targeting one may not automatically improve the other.

The role of social support deserves particular attention. Unlike psychological capital and self-efficacy, which are internal resources residing within the individual, social support is external, coming from colleagues, family, friends, and professional networks. The finding that it independently predicted both stress and well-being during wartime aligns with a long line of trauma research, including longitudinal studies of posttraumatic stress following the 2011 Oslo and Utøya attacks, which demonstrated that perceived social support shapes recovery trajectories over years. In a school setting, this external resource is often organized hierarchically: principals can marshal institutional support, counselors have professional networks for processing crisis work, and teachers may be more isolated in their classrooms with children who need them constantly.

Role theory provides a useful lens for interpreting the pattern. Classic formulations, such as Biddle’s foundational work on role expectations, identities, and behaviors, hold that the demands and resources attached to a social role shape the psychological experience of its occupants. Principals in wartime typically retain decision-making autonomy—they choose how to reorganize schedules, deploy staff, and communicate with authorities. Teachers, by contrast, often bear responsibility without proportional control, executing crisis protocols devised by others while managing frontline emotional labor. The literature on teacher autonomy consistently links greater decision latitude to lower stress, and the wartime findings extend that principle into the most extreme conditions schools can face.

The study also situates itself within a growing international literature on educators in conflict zones. Prior research has documented traumatic stress among Syrian teachers working inside a war zone, PTSD prevalence among teachers in post-war communities, and traumatic stress among teachers and healthcare workers during the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia. Israeli studies from the same period examined preschool and kindergarten teachers, and special education teachers, under fire, finding similar protective effects of psychological capital and social support. By comparing three distinct occupational roles within a single school system during one crisis, the new study adds a structural dimension that single-role studies cannot provide: it shows that the same wartime environment produces systematically different psychological outcomes depending on one’s position within the school hierarchy.

The practical implications are explicit in the authors’ conclusion: interventions during wartime must be role-sensitive. A one-size-fits-all psychological support program for school staff is likely to miss its mark, because teachers enter the crisis with lower baseline psychological capital and self-efficacy and face different stressors than principals or counselors. Targeted approaches might include group-based interventions that build psychological capital through the four HER0 components—hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism—alongside structured peer-support networks that address teachers’ isolation. The literature on low-intensity psychosocial interventions, such as the World Health Organization’s Problem Management Plus program, offers scalable models that could be adapted for school settings in conflict-affected regions, and stress first aid frameworks have been shown to bolster group cohesion and reduce stress in other high-demand occupations.

Beyond the immediate wartime context, the findings carry a warning for any education system that treats its teachers as infinitely resilient. The 544 educators in this study sustained an entire educational apparatus through a national trauma, and the price of that sustainability fell disproportionately on the classroom level of the hierarchy. If psychological capital and self-efficacy are the internal shields that determine who emerges intact, then schools and ministries have a concrete, evidence-based target: these attributes are malleable, trainable, and responsive to organizational support. The research, funded by the Fund for Applied Research in Education of the Mofet Institute in Tel Aviv and approved by the ethics committee of Michlalah Jerusalem College, suggests that investing in the inner resources and social networks of teachers is not a luxury of peacetime but a core component of national resilience—because no education system can serve as a pillar of stability if the people inside its classrooms are quietly falling apart.

Subject of Research: Occupational role, psychological capital, social support, and occupational self-efficacy as predictors of stress and well-being among Israeli educators during wartime

Article Title: Educators’ Internal and External Coping Resources During Wartime

Article References: Alon, R., & Rubin, O. (2026). Educators’ Internal and External Coping Resources During Wartime. School Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-026-09912-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12310-026-09912-z

Keywords: wartime stress, teachers, principals, school counselors, psychological capital, occupational self-efficacy, social support, well-being, school mental health, Israel-Hamas war, path analysis, educator resilience