TAF PUBLISHING

This study aims to investigate the views of primary school teachers about their classroom management behavior about different variables and to detect their autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire behavior often displayed in classrooms. Three hundred four participants, 257 female and 147 male teachers from 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. After 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,” 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 concerning gender, age, the type of school they have graduated from, professional status, level of class, and receiving classroom management training.