Studying the Relationship between Teaching Barriers and Work Engagement Mediated by Support Strategies for Highschool Female Physical Education Teachers in Tehran

Work engagement of physical education teachers, has been considered by many researchers in recent years as the most important stimulus for students' desire for sports. This psychological variable has received a great deal of impact from teaching barriers, which varies in accordance to the amount of change in teacher support strategy. Therefore, in this study the relationship between teaching barriers and work engagement as mediated by the supportive strategies of female high school physical education teachers in Tehran was investigated. This study, using a descriptive-correlational approach, examined the opinions of female physical education teachers in 19 districts of Tehran, as a statistical population (1071 people). According to Cochran's formula, 387 people were sampled, which were randomly selected in a stratified-proportional manner. A strandard questionnaire was used to collect the data. To assess the validity of the research, face validity a type of content validity assessment method was used. For this purpose, the questions were reviewed, checked and modified by 30 educational experts in three stages and were finalized in the last stage. To measure the reliability of the questionnaire, Cronbach's alpha, which is a kind of internal consistency was used, in which the average was calculated to be 0.883 for our research variables. Pearson and Eta correlation coefficients and ANOVA analysis of variance were used to test the research hypotheses. Also, to perform the calculations, we took advantage of softwares Excel 2017 and SPSS 21. Findings showed that teaching barriers affect teachers' work engagement by changing the type of teacher support strategy and teaching barriers do not directly affect teachers' work engagement. Based on the results, it was proposed that, in order to address the issues of teaching barriers in the examined schools, first structural barriers should be addressed, then cultural barriers and finally material barriers, and since teachers who use communication-logical, social-logical, communication-emotional, and social-emotional support techniques in that order have lower job commitment, it is necessary to pay special attention to the employment of these individuals and in the end it was suggested that in order to increase the job power of teachers, teachers use more communication-emotional method.