A systematic review of school teachers’ professional identity tensions: types and coping strategies

Teachers’ professional identity tension (PIT) is a concept that describes teachers’ struggles related to their professional identity in terms of their personal and professional self, external role expectations, and relational ideologies. This study follows the PRISMA 2020 statement to synthesise the types and coping strategies of primary and secondary school teachers’ PIT, based on an analysis of 65 selected English-language articles published from 2005 to 2025. The results indicate that teachers were confronted with three main categories of professional identity tensions: tensions of identity transition, tensions of ideologies, and tensions of multiple roles. Teachers’ coping strategies include self-solutions, interpersonal negotiation, support seeking, and self-authenticity preservation. Self-solutions can be further classified as constructive or non-constructive strategies. Constructive strategies, including metacognition, psychological regulation, cognitive and practical adjustments, and agency enactment, can help teachers reconcile these tensions and form their teacher identity.