Teacher's opinions on values education practices in the secondary school mathematics teaching program

The aim of this study is to reveal the opinions of mathematics teachers about the base values and values education practices that the mathematics curriculum updated in the 2017-2018 academic year. The research was configured with a phenomenology pattern. The study used snowball sampling, one of the types of purposive sampling, to select participants.The participants of the research consist of 20 mathematics teachers working in Güroymak district of Bitlis province in the 2020-2021 academic year. The semi-structured interview form created by the researcher was used as a data collection tool to get the opinions of the participating teachers about the mathematics curriculum. When the findings were examined, half of the teachers were able to associate root values and other values with the mathematics curriculum. Teachers prioritized the values of self-control and justice, among the values aimed to be gained. In addition to the root values, the teachers expressed their views on the importance of empathy and sharing. All the teachers stated that values can be gained with the problems in the books. It was found that the teachers preferred the implicit curriculum more than other program types in values education during mathematics teaching and they expected the students who were successful to gain the most responsibility and self-control values. Regarding the level of student readiness, it was found that some of the teachers (n=3) found the values within the curriculum appropriate and some (n=13) did not find it appropriate. However, it was found that the teachers, who stated that the values were not suitable for the level of student readiness, attributed the reasons for being unsuitable to the individual, family, and environment. It has been found that almost half of the teachers use the activities in values education, educational games and the methods and techniques of making use of the students' emotions and experiences intensively. Another finding of the research is that more than half of the teachers use the smart board as one of the instructional technologies and prefer the discovery strategy among the learning-teacher strategies, and the action behavior approach among the value teaching approaches. It has been found that the education given in the pandemic mainly refers to the negative aspects of the teachers regarding the effect of values education in mathematics teaching. Finally, suggestions that they want to develop and change in the mathematics curriculum are given.