Identifying Students' Classroom Misbehavior And Teachers' Emotional Strategies Against Them: A Qualitative Research

The importance of regulating emotions by the teacher in the face of misbehavior observed in the classroom has been widely accepted. However, there was a lack of studies on why and how emotions are regulated by teachers in Iran. Therefore, this research was carried out in a qualitative way with the approach of lived experience with the aim of extracting the strategies of regulating the teacher's emotions against students' misbehavior in a sample of 16 teachers of Zanjan province. After making the necessary arrangements, the participants were interviewed in person and virtually. The participants were 16 secondary school teachers with an average of 10 years of teaching experience, with an age range of 24 to 40 (with an average age of 34 years) and with a bachelor's degree (9 cases), a master's degree (6 cases), and a doctorate (1 case). Purposive sampling method was used to select the participants. To collect the required data, a semi-structured individual interview was used until reaching theoretical saturation, and the obtained information was analyzed using content analysis. Colaizzi's seven-step method (1978) was used to analyze the content of the interviews. This model consists of seven steps, step 1) reading carefully all descriptions and important findings from the participants, step 2) extracting important and meaningful phrases related to the target topic, 3) understanding the extracted important phrases, step 4) sorting the descriptions of the participants, 5) turning all the inferred opinions into comprehensive and complete descriptions, step 6) turning the complete descriptions of the phenomenon into a real summary and useful description and 7) final validation.
The interview questions were arranged around the teachers' emotion regulation strategies against students' misbehavior. Simultaneously with data collection, their analysis began; In this way, each interview was read several times, then the texts related to the lived experience of each person were placed in one text to form the analysis unit. Then the meaningful units of the overall text were determined and the summarized meaningful units were extracted from them. Finally, analytical codes were extracted from them. The obtained codes were carefully studied and based on the similarities and differences between them, subcategories and then general categories were formed. By theoretical analysis based on conceptual similarities, the general categories within the topics were extracted. In this way, the general text of the interview was arranged in a classified manner from the topics to the meaningful units. To ensure the internal and external validity of the research results, the four criteria recommended by Goba and Lincoln were evaluated. The reliability level was obtained by Krippendorf's alpha method of 0.77.
After implementing a total of 8:25 hours of interviews, the results were categorized into two categories of students' classroom misbehavior and teachers' emotion regulation strategies against these behaviors. Five sub-themes for students' classroom misbehavior and two sub-categories of positive and negative strategies were extracted. Class misbehavior is the disturbing things in the educational atmosphere of the class, which causes the emotional and behavioral reaction of the teacher in front of them. The findings of this research showed that teachers used positive emotion regulation strategies to regulate their emotions, including: situation correction, re-evaluation, and response modulation or adjustment, and negative emotion regulation strategies, including: suppression, rumination, and catastrophic perception, against misbehavior. Among them: uncooperative behaviors, neglecting lessons, verbal and physical aggression towards classmates, verbal and physical aggression towards the teacher, excessive joking and mocking each other in the class and cheating in the exam. Adaptive strategies include strategies that have appropriate psychological and behavioral consequences. These strategies are also known as positive strategies in psychology. One of these strategies is the strategy of correcting the situation. According to teachers, this strategy was an attempt to correct the situation in order to change its emotional impact, which refers to changing the physical and external environment of the person. Another strategy was the re-evaluation strategy, which the teachers described as an example of cognitive change and interpreting the meaning of an event in order to change its emotional impact. For example, it may involve interpreting an event by broadening one's perspective to see the "bigger picture." According to the interviews, it was found that reappraisal effectively reduces the physiological, mental and neurological emotional response. Modulation or adjustment of the response based on which teachers have been able to control their anger when observing students' misbehavior, by taking a deep breath or walking in the classroom or drinking a glass of water, and at that moment their feelings in a positive way. show more In fact, as it was found, this strategy includes trying to directly affect the experimental, behavioral and physiological response systems. Incompatible or negative strategies include strategies that do not have appropriate psychological and behavioral consequences and are often challenging. According to the conducted interviews, repression was the most frequent strategy used in the classroom. According to the teachers, this strategy is an example of establishing attention, which includes trying to direct one's attention from specific thoughts and mental images to other content in order to improve one's emotional state. The rumination strategy is another negative strategy because this strategy aggravated the emotional distress of teachers. According to them, the occurrence of unfortunate situations and misbehavior of students causes intellectual preoccupation around various aspects of the event and the feelings and thoughts created due to unfortunate situations are constantly reviewed by the teacher. The negative strategy of catastrophic perception refers to the situation where the teachers perceived and expressed the created conditions as more severe and terrible than the reality of that event. These strategies are used against student misbehavior. Misbehavior including uncooperative behaviors include moving in class, not attending regularly, talkativeness, without permission to speak, using inappropriate words in class regardless of the presence of the teacher, grumbling about the lesson and insisting on finishing the class early. Such behaviors slow down the learning process. In the conducted interviews, uncooperative behaviors were the most frequent and were reported in various forms in different situations. According to the teachers, neglecting the lesson as the second most frequent misbehavior, mostly included not finishing and not doing the homework, not following the learning materials in the class. The learning process cannot be done without the necessary attention and concentration. In the interviews conducted, aggression was mentioned as the third type of misbehavior towards classmates and teachers; Of course, there was more aggression towards classmates. Other misbehavior included teasing and joking, according to the teachers, which disrupted the learning process and class order. The last case was the misbehavior of cheating, which was considered a social violation and a disciplinary problem according to the teachers, and includes cheating in the exam, cheating in exercises and homework, and group coordination for cheating.
This research presented results about the most common emotion regulation strategies in teachers, which can be used to intervene in teachers' professional development programs and planning and decision-making in the field of ways to prevent and deal with all kinds of misbehavior.