Analysis of teachers'professional job satisfaction and challenges: Case of Mardin

In this study, professional challenges faced by teachers, whom are one of the most important elements of education, and theirs professional job satisfaction are examined. Elements effecting job satisfaction and types of professional challenges faced by teachers are researched and results are investigated in details in the light of current literature in the context of demographic characteristics of the teachers. The scope of this research is the public schools in the central district of Mardin and Kızıltepe district that officially affiliated with Ministry of Education in spring semester of 2014. In this study, a total of 981 teachers working in primary, secondary and high schools are interviewed. 481 of these teachers are serving in Mardin Artuklu district and 500 of them are on duty in Kızıltepe district in 72 schools in total in Mardin. In order to collect data 1150 questionnaries are send to teachers and 1000 questionnaires are returned. 19 surveys are not taken into consideration due to emptiness or same response and the data were obtained with opinion of 981 teachers. The return rate of questionnaires is 86.9%. The data in this study consist of three parts and derived from a survey titled: " Self-Assessment Questionnaire of Professional Satisfaction and Effectiveness". The type of data obtained from this study is factual and critical. Factual data is derived from the first part of the survey titled. "Personal Information Part" and data that indicates personal and professional characteristics of surveyed teachers are obtained in this section. The critical data is derived from the answers to the questions in the second part of ''Self-Assessment Questionnaire of Professional Satisfaction and Effectivenness'' that developed by Çapa, Çakıroğlu and Sarıkaya (2005) titled: "The Scare of Self-Assessment of Professional Challenges" and in the third section developed by Yelboğa (2009) titled: "The Scale of JSS-Job Satisfaction". The analysis of data obtained in this study was performed using SPSS 17.0 (Statistical Package for The Social Sciences) software package. In order to identify the challenges faced by teachers, results are presented from three subdimensions of "Teachers Self-Sufficiency Scale", which are "Student Engagement", "Teaching Stategies and "Classroom Management". According to avarage of the scores obtained from "Teachers Self-Efficiency Scale", it is observed that teachers are having difficulty most with students' participation of the course. The other subjects of difficulty that teachers struggle most are found respectively as "Classroom Management" and practicing "Teaching strategies" According to findings derived from "JSS-Job Satisfaction Scale" in which teachers' satisfaction towards their profession is investigated, it is observed that teachers achieve job satisfaction most at the subject related to nature of teaching profession, whereas achieve least satisfaction at the subject of wages. Keywords: Teaching Profession, Job Satisfaction, Career Challenge.