Teacher resilience and adaptation in digital teaching contexts: a systematic review of research trends, psychological constructs, and evidence gaps.

UNLABELLED: Digital teaching expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 emergency and continues through hybrid, robot-mediated, metaverse, and artificial-intelligence-supported education. Yet evidence about teacher resilience and adaptation remains conceptually and methodologically dispersed. This PRISMA 2020-guided systematic review mapped how resilience and adaptation are conceptualized, which psychological constructs and indirect statistical pathways have been studied, and where important evidence gaps remain. Web of Science and Scopus records exported on 21 and 23 February 2026 yielded 4,465 records; 27 English-language empirical studies were included after duplicate removal, screening, retrieval, and full-text eligibility assessment. Data were extracted into a structured matrix, synthesized descriptively and thematically, and appraised with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) 2018. The corpus comprised 11 qualitative, 9 quantitative non-randomized, 5 mixed-methods, and 2 quantitative descriptive studies, involving at least 11,199 teachers or teacher educators. Twenty-one studies concerned COVID-19/emergency remote teaching and six examined emerging technologies. Six non-mutually-exclusive themes were identified: personal psychological resources and coping (22/27), pedagogical adaptation, agency, and innovation (21/27), digital competence, self-efficacy, and readiness (19/27), contextual and structural constraints (18/27), wellbeing-related outcomes (16/27), and social or institutional support (13/27). Seven studies tested indirect effects, but all used cross-sectional quantitative components; none formally tested contextual moderation or evaluated an intervention. MMAT findings supported qualitative coherence while highlighting confounding, representativeness, nonresponse, and weakest-component limitations in quantitative and mixed-methods evidence. The evidence therefore supports a context-embedded descriptive account of resilience and adaptation. Future research should prioritize longitudinal, intervention, and explicitly technology-specific designs.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: https://osf.io/xf2ve/overview, xf2ve.