Prospective teachers' perception on possible classroom situations with problem behavior: An investigation through discipline models

Coping with problem behaviour depends on teachers' perspectives of classroom management strategies, which can be regarded as discipline models teachers implement in the class. How teachers avoid problem behaviours or their strategies and techniques to deal with them may reveal teachers' understanding of discipline. To understand prospective teachers' views on discipline models, this study investigates how prospective teachers evaluate and respond to the situations that they may encounter in the classroom. This is a qualitative study with phenomenology design, and with 50 prospective teachers attending the Primary School Education Department of a state university in Turkiye as the participants. The data were collected through participants' reflection on two sample cases. The participants were asked how they would evaluate the given cases and how they would respond to them. The first case addressed the stereotype "the student is the source of the problem behaviour" and the second one was related to how prospective teachers perceived the difference between punishment and logical consequences. The findings revealed prospective teachers reported different responses to the given cases. For the first case, prospective teachers stated the source of the problem behaviour was teacher-driven. Their response was more on the discipline model in which the teacher control was high. As for the second case, the participants focused on the students' intentions while evaluating the behaviours. It was found that although the participants took the intentions into account, they evaluated the situations according to the consequences. Finally, the study showed that prospective teachers used interventionist strategies (high teacher control) in coping with problem behaviours.