Examining pre-school teachers' strategies to undesirable behaviours and determining their educational requirements in using these strategies

In preschool education, one of the problems that kindergarten teachers encounter most in the classroom is unwanted behaviors. They are the leading factors that affect classroom order, motivation and efficiency of the teacher/students negatively. Therefore, the unwanted behaviors should be prevented effectively before they emerge or should be extinguished when they emerge. Teacher's ability to cope with the unwanted behaviors effectively depends on their competency in this subject. Thus, determining teachers educational needs in this point has a great importance in fulfilling the lacking abilities. The working group of this research that analyzes the strategies the kindergarten teachers use against the unwanted behaviors in the classroom management and aims to specify the educational needs for using the strategies is made up of 140 kindergarten teachers who work in the central districts of Izmir. In the research, both the quantitative and qualitative research techniques were used. As a quantitative data collection tool, "The Scale of Specifying the Strategies the Kindergarten Teachers Use Against the Unwanted Behaviors in the Classroom Management", prepared in the type of five point likert scale by Keles (2015), was used. In the qualitative part of the research, semi-structured interview form applied to 20 kindergarten teachers was used. The collected quantitative data was analyzed by frequency distribution, percentage distribution, calculating the arithmetic average, standard deviation and making use of nonparametric Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H tests. In the analysis of the qualitative data, content analysis was used. According to the results of the research, it is stated that the unwanted behaviors the kindergarten teachers encounter most are the ones that disturb general classroom order. Against the unwanted behaviors, the kindergarten teachers use severe responses less which can affect the student negatively. Some of the strategies that kindergarten teachers use differ according to seniority, number of the students, inclusive student, status of the in service training and age group of the class. Among the discipline models of the kindergarten teachers, control model got the highest point and social discipline model got the lowest point. While the points got from the discipline models differ according to the factor of inclusive student and age group, they do not differ significantly according to the factor of seniority, number of the students and status of the in service training. According to the results, kindergarten teachers state that unwanted behaviors in the classroom cause a lot of problems and they have difficulty in using the strategies against the unwanted behaviors. Kindergarten teachers stated that they primarily want to take education in which the strategies used against unwanted behaviors are sorted out for 3-4-5 year-old children and the education should be based upon practice. Key words: Classroom management, unwanted behaviors in the classroom, discipline models, need of education