Examination of work stress and professional performance of primary school teachers

Stress is a physical and psychological negativity experienced by the individual while adapting to constantly changing environmental and psychological conditions in daily life. In other words, it is possible to define it as an individual's response during adaptation. In addition to daily life, individuals often react to problems they experience in their working environment. When the literature is examined, this situation is defined as work stress. Employees with intense work stress will not be able to behave in accordance with predetermined standards and will not achieve the expected goals. Therefore, it is considered important that individuals' work stress will affect the desired goal. One of the occupational groups in which job stress occurs is "teaching". It will be difficult for the teachers involved in the teaching process to reach the goals set in a stressful environment. A teacher who is in the working environment with younger students will be able to reflect the intense work stress he / she has experienced to the children, and thus future generations will be affected negatively. Besides, the professional performance of the teacher will decrease. With this research, it was aimed to investigate the work stress dimension of classroom teachers and to what extent this dimension was reflected on professional performance. For this purpose, the relationships between the situations that will affect each other are examined within the framework of various variables and relational screening model is used for this purpose. In this study, the study group was determined as classroom teachers. As a sample, in the 2018-2019 academic year, the answers to the questions asked to the class teachers through questionnaire were obtained. The study group of the study consisted of 385 classroom teachers in Elazığ province. In the analysis of the study, t-test and Anova test were used for the analysis of arithmetic mean parametric tests and correlation analysis was used to determine the relationship between dimensions. As a result of the research; It was observed that the job stresses of 51-year-old teachers were higher than the 20-30 and 31-40-year-old teachers. It was observed that 20-30 and 31-40 age group teachers had higher personal professional development, student recognition, teaching-learning, learning development and school-family relations professional performances than 51-year-old group teachers. Married teachers had higher professional performance than widowed or divorced teachers. It was observed that job stress decreased with education. It was seen that the teachers who have graduate degree have higher professional performance than the teachers who have graduated from educational institute. It was observed that the classroom teachers in the city center had higher job stress than the classroom teachers in the city center. Teachers who provide education in the village and district have higher professional performance levels than the teachers who provide education in the province. There was no significant difference in the class variable taught stress and occupational performance. The professional performance levels of classroom teachers with 10-21 and 21-30 students were higher than those of 31-40 students. It has been observed that classroom teachers who have 6-10 years of seniority have higher professional performance levels than classroom teachers who have 16 years of seniority. In this study, it is concluded that job stress of classroom teachers has a significant effect on their professional performance. Increased job stress leads to a decrease in the teacher's professional performance. Work stress has a significant effect on student recognition, learning-teaching, monitoring learning-development, and decreasing school-family community performance. Keywords: Class teacher, job stress, professional performance