Investigating primary school teachers’ views about their classroom management behavior

The aim of this study is to investigate the views of primary school teachers about their classroom management behavior with regard to different variables and to detect their autocratic, democratic as well as laissez-faire behavior often displayed in classrooms. 304 participants in total, 257 female and 147 male teachers, from the city of Adana were voluntarily involved in this descriptive survey model. The “Teachers’ Perception of Classroom Management Scale” (TPCMS), developed by Terzi (2001), was used to collect the data. SPSS 21 was used to analyze the data, the Mann-Whitney U test was used for a paired comparison and Kruskal Wallis tests were used for multiple comparisons besides the descriptive statistics. At the conclusion of the study, it was detected that teachers “always” display democratic behaviors, “sometimes” display autocratic behaviors, and “rarely” display laissez-faire behaviors. The most common democratic behaviors of the teachers are “explaining the rules with reasons, speaking without shouting, assessing tests objectively, and prioritizing group work”. According to the teachers’ perception, the most common laissez-faire behavior is “only helping the students when they ask for it”, while the most common autocratic behaviors are basing the educational activities on the subject and maintaining a distance towards the students. According to the results, there are significant differences among the levels of authoritarian, democratic and laissez-faire behaviors with respect to gender, age, the type of school they have graduated from, professional status, level of class, and receiving classroom management training.