This study aims to understand teachers' coping with elementary students' problem behaviors and conducts a qualitative research with research questions such as 'what are the essences of teachers' experience in correcting elementary students' problem be...
This study aims to understand teachers' coping with elementary students' problem behaviors and conducts a qualitative research with research questions such as 'what are the essences of teachers' experience in correcting elementary students' problem behaviors? How do teachers cope with such problem behaviors? What are contributors to the process of teachers' coping?'.
For this research, it performed focus group interview with 18 teachers who experienced elementary students' problem behaviors, analyzed data collected with grounded theory methodology and divided them into 206 concepts, 54 subordinate categories and 23 superordinate categories.
As a result of analysis, causal conditions of teachers' experiences in the process of guiding problem behaviors were their efforts to guide problem behaviors and contextual conditions were repeated problem behaviors and noncooperative parents. Central phenomena included physical and emotional pain due to children and intervenient conditions in these central phenomena were teachers' experience of childcare and their understanding of parents' feeling. Action/interaction strategy focused on child guidance with control of emotion and expectation and correction of how to cope with them. Consequently, teachers were proud of changes in children's behaviors and had confidence in meeting children with problem behaviors later.
As a result of arranging teachers' coping with problem behaviors by time, it was found that it had such stages as facing problem behaviors, controlling them and showing cooperation, and the core category which integrated and explained all concepts in this study was 'expectation and faith in possibility of change'. It was also considered as the value teachers pursue for counseling and guidance and as the driving force of a new measure.
The results of this study will be able to be used as basic materials for effective strategies to cope with children's problem behaviors and as teacher training program.