Stress and its coping strategies among special education and regular classroom teachers who are teaching students with special educational needs -

Abstract

This research sheds light on sources of stress, effects and its coping strategies: on one hand, among regular classroom teachers and on the other hand among special education teachers who teach students having special educational needs. The purpose of this research study was threefold: (a) to identify the main causes behind stress and its effects on both, regular and special educators teaching students having different learning disabilities; (b) to identify the main coping strategies that help decrease teachers’ stress; and (c) to examine the correlation between stress sources and effects and utilized coping strategies among regular and special education teachers. This research uses mainly quantitative survey design, and a small qualitative part. A total of 139 teachers, belonging to eight private schools in Beirut, Lebanon, were selected to participate in this questionnaire. The teachers, 100 regular classroom teachers and 39 special educators, were directly involved at one point in time in teaching students with special educational needs. The responses to the questionnaire items were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlational coefficient. The outcome of survey showed that there was no significant difference between special and regular classroom teachers in all sources and effects of stress. It was noticed that that there were no specific sources of stress that are extremely stressful for regular and special educators; yet, five out of thirty causes of stress are mildly stressful, and the rest of sources are moderately stressful. Furthermore, there were no specific effects of stress that occur very frequently or almost; yet eight of the listed effects occur infrequently, and ten effects occur frequently. Moreover, there were three mildly effective coping strategies, five moderately effective and seven extremely effective coping strategies. Finally, Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r), showed that most sources of stress has weak positive correlation with the coping strategies; yet most