Teacher’s Mastery Experiences on Coping with Stress at Work Place among the Public Secondary School Teachers in Mathare Sub- County, Nairobi, County, Kenya.

Abstract

This study assessed Teachers’ Mastery Experiences on Coping with stress at Work Place among the Public Secondary School Teachers in Mathare Sub- County.The study adopted a mixed method approach; a convergent parallel design was employed to enable the researcher investigate the relationship between teachers’ mastery experiences on working with stress at workplace among the public secondary school teachers in Mathare Sub-County, Nairobi County, Kenya. A census sampling technique was adopted to selectEighty-six respondents. Questionnaires were distributed to the respondents to collect quantitative data while interview guide was used to collect qualitative data. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 was used to run descriptive and inferential statistics on the data. To present the data, frequency distribution tables were employed. The study's results showsmoderate and positive relationship between mastery experiences and proactive coping methods (r=.451; p<0.05). Similarly, the correlation between mastery experiences and reflective coping was moderately positive, (r=.411; p<0.05).There was a positive weak relationship between mastery experiences and preventive coping methods, (r=.239; p<0.05).The correlation between mastery experiences and instrumental coping was also a weak positive correlation, (r=.294; p<0.05). Mastery experiences and emotional support also presented a weak positive relationship (r=.258; p<0.05). This demonstrated that teachers' mastery experience had a favorable impact on stress management. The study recommended the entrenchment of coping skills into teachers’ professional development programs to empower them with techniques to manage stress at workplace.The results of this study are expected to equip teachers in Mathare Sub-County with different ways of coping with stress at work place, help teachers address their experience that will be useful to educational community as a whole for it would lead to the reduction of job dissatisfaction and costly turn over.