Evaluation of teachers' perceptions of professional values and democratic attitudes

The purpose of this study is to determine teachers' perceptions of professional values and democratic attitudes and evaluate whether there is a significant difference in these data according to demographic, educational status and professional experience variables. In addition, it also examines the relationship between teachers' perceptions of professional values and their democratic attitudes. The sample of study consists of 370 teachers working in secondary schools in the city center of Isparta in 2018-2019 academic year. The data of study were collected through "Personal Information Form" developed by the researcher, the "Teachers' Democratic Attitude Scale" developed by Büyükkaragöz and Kesici (1998), and "The Scale of Teacher Professional Values " developed by Tunca (2012). Frequency, standard deviation, normality test, Mann Whitney-U, Kruskal Wallis-H and Pearson Correlation tests were used for data analysis. According to results of this research, it was concluded that teachers' perceptions of professional values and democratic attitudes are high. As a result of difference tests, teachers' views on dimension of "being against violence", which is a sub-dimension of professional value scale, differ significantly according to gender, age, marital status, the type of high school graduated from and the type of high school they work. It was observed that female teachers compared to male teachers, teachers under the age of 30 compared to teachers over 30 and unmarried teachers compared to married teachers were more likely to be against violence. It was concluded that teachers' views on democratic attitude levels differentiated in favor of female teachers in terms of gender, in favor of teachers working in the Science High School in terms of type of school they work, in favor of Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge and Psychological Counseling and Guidance/ Philosophy teachers in terms of the branch. In addition, it was determined by correlation analysis that there was a positive relationship between teachers' perceptions of professional values and their democratic attitude levels.