Burnout and self-efficacy among special education teachers

Teacher burnout is a serious problem in education today, which directly or indirectly affects their teaching performance. Bandura and others (1986) have found that an individual’s self-efficacy plays a major role in how goals, tasks, and challenges are approached. The special educators have to play different roles and some of the factors which are identified as stressors for special educators are workload, lack of perceived success, amount of direct contact with special children, programme structure and role clarification (Waseem 1993). Therefore, the purpose of this present study was to examine the relationship of teacher burnout and self efficacy beliefs of the special education teachers. The study was Ex-post facto in nature. The sample for the present study consisted of thirty five women special education teachers purposively chosen from five special schools in Chennai city. The women special educators were in the age range of 25 years to 40 years, having a work experience of 2 years to 10 years, salary ranging from to rupees 4000 to 12,000 rupees. The following standardised tools were used; The Maslach Burnout Inventory Educators’ Survey (MBI-ES; Kokkinos, 2006; Maslach et al., 1996) and the Teacher Self-efficacy Scale (Scharwzer, Schmitz & Daytner, 1999). Pearson Product moment Correlation was calculated to understand the relationship between Burnout and Self-efficacy. One way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was computed to find out the difference in Self efficacy and the dimensions of Burnout among the special educators with regard to the chosen demographic variables (namely, age, income and years of experience).