Teachers’ Coping Methods for Dealing with Students’ Misbehaviours and Their Opinions about Effectiveness of These Methods

Preventing or minimizing students’ misbehaviours is one of the indispensable prerequisites of ensuring an effective teaching-learning process. Therefore, it is of vital importance to examine teachers’ coping methods for dealing with students’ misbehaviours and to evaluate the effectiveness of these methods. The qualitative case study research design was employed in this study to examine teachers’ views of students’ misbehaviours. The study was carried out with the participation of third and fourth class teachers working in the central districts of Konya. Individual semi-structured interviews were carried out with 20 teachers. The results of the study revealed that teachers defined the behaviours such as distrupting the lesson, showing lack of interest in the class, causing communication problems as misbehaviours and accounted for these misbehaviours by heterogeneous class structure, overuse of media and the low level of family education. It was found that all the teachers prefer introducing and discussing classroom rules with the students in order to prevent misbehaviours. Beside this, altering the physical structure of the classroom and contacting students’ families were among the most frequently taken measures taken by the teachers. While teachers’ responses to students’ misbehaviours varied, verbal warning was the most frequently used response, followed by giving punishments, showing anger by shouting, warning by gestures, having a direct conversation with the student, awarding students for good behaviour. Among these responses, awarding good behaviours, having a direct conversation and parent cooperation were found to be the most effective in behaviour modification while the responses such as giving punishments, showing anger by shouting and warning by gestures were ineffective. In addition, it was revealed that although teachers would like to have in-service training on coping with students’ misbehaviours, they found it insufficient