What Constitutes a ‘Classroom Problem’ for Today's Teacher?: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">Teachers face situations that are difficult to solve, which affect their practices in the classroom. Teachers´ability to face problematic situations been related to educators' adaptive and metacognitive capacity. This study aimed to contrast the recent literature on classroom problems with reports from Chilean teachers regarding what they mean today as critical situations in the classroom. The major problems with the highest prevalence were categorized based on a literature review. Subsequently, teachers from three educational levels (pre-school, primary and secondary) were asked to relate situations in which they had experienced a crisis in their profession. After a filtering based on the relevance and textual richness present, the stories (n=145) were subjected to a thematic analysis and contrasted with the categories obtained from the reviewed literature. The results show a low proportion of problems associated with learning management in the classroom and, on the other hand, a high proportion of behavioral problems in students focused on situations of aggression towards the teacher. These conclusions are discussed to reconsider the concept of "classroom problem situations" and, based on this, questioning the role of teacher training in the development of skills for the management of authentic problem situations.</p>

Classroom disruptions in digital teaching during the pandemic – an interview study

“…Teachers, as the initiators of good classroom management (Mulvahill, 2018), are focused here. The importance of their role in the process of managing the classroom and digitalizing the education process is obvious (Wohlfart and Wagner, 2023), leaving questions open for current research which competences, skills, and roles teachers need (Sepúlveda-Vallejos et al, 2023). Especially skills and strategies for teachers to deal with classroom disruptions are hereby only vaguely implied in general strategies and recommendations for classroom management (Durak and Saritepeci, 2017).…”

“…Attentive and academically engaged students (Zoder-Martell et al, 2023) are less likely to disrupt the classroom (Li and Titsworth, 2015;Durak and Saritepeci, 2017;Rattay et al, 2018) and more likely to achieve academic success (Marquez et al, 2016). Furthermore, these adaptations help teachers to effectively deal with classroom disruptions and therefore decrease the amount of stress they are experiencing (Wettstein et al, 2021;Sepúlveda-Vallejos et al, 2023).…”

“…New strategies for teachers, as part of their classroom management, were developed (Gross and McCann, 2022). However, current research about disruptions deals only, if at all, with classroom management in general (Sepúlveda-Vallejos et al, 2023;Thiel et al, 2023;Zoder-Martell et al, 2023). There is only a marginal focus on the topic of dealing with classroom disruptions in the digital context, which is particularly important for preservice and newly in-service teachers, since lockdowns, forced online learning, and frequent changes in requirements have made it hard, if not impossible, for these young professionals to refine their abilities in dealing with difficult situations (Marcum-Dietrich et al, 2021).…”