Identifying the Stress Level and Coping Mechanisms of Special School Teachers

All students require support from teachers, classmates, family and friends in order to thrive and gain full benefits from their school experience. Some students have special needs, which have behavioural, intellectual, physical and multiple disabilities require special education services to enable them to attend and benefit fully from their school experience. Special teachers have a great demand as they are the people who initiate for identifying and use the potentialities of the children with special needs. At the same time, it is the fact that working with this special group is very difficult and challenging. Meeting the daily behavioural needs of the students is a challenge and teaching in special school is a stressful job. More over this stress can reduce s the teachers' motivation and have negative effects such as alienation from the workplace, absenteeism and attrition. So it is important to identify the stress of the special teachers, and the different sources of stress.The present study describe the level of occupational stress, sources of stress, level of teaching stress and coping mechanisms of the special education teachers.As the main focus of the study was to identify the stress level and coping mechanisms of special teachers, interview schedule was considered to be ideally suitable to collect descriptive data and 70 teachers where selected for the study. The present study shows that special education teachers are experiencing medium level of occupational stress and medium level of teaching stress when handling children with special needs.