Abstract

This study aims to address the problems that teachers are facing in classroom management and to find solutions to these problems. This is a phenomenologically designed qualitative research study. 28 classroom teachers, who are working in the city of Malatya in 2017-2018 school year, easy to reach with the help of the convenience sampling, a purposive sampling method and who are working at different primary schools, made up the working group. A semi-structured interview form consisting of three open-ended questions had been used as the data collection tool. A total of 42 codes were determined for the issue of evaluation of views about the difficulties that classroom teachers encounter in classroom management. While interpreting each code, the relations between the findings were explained plus cause and effect relationships. As a result, classroom teachers determined the problems they have encountered in classroom management most as: parents’ avoidance in taking responsibility of the students, inadequacy of the lesson materials and incompetency of the school’s physical conditions. The classroom teachers evaluated themselves in classroom management which revealed that some teachers see themselves as having effective communication skills, they are more empathic towards their students, they set the rules and expectations together with students and are capable of keeping the students motivated; while other teachers see themselves as inexperienced, impatient towards students and some stated their inadequacy was due to their inability to guide their students in a proper way. This paper has identified some ideas such as being in touch with custodians, students renewing themselves and paying attention to personal differences of students which could bring better class management with remarkable outcomes.

Key words: Classroom management, classroom teachers, solution proposals.