Abstract:

In the current study, it was aimed to determine the extent to which pre-school teachers possess thinking supportive behaviours on the basis of their own perceptions and to investigate whether this varies depending on some variables. In the current study employing the survey model, a total of 190 pre-school teachers were reached and the analyses were carried out on the responses given by 157 teachers as a result of removing outliers. In the study, data were collected with the “Scale of Thinking Supportive Teacher Behaviours - Preschool Teacher Form”. In the analysis of the data, descriptive statistics were calculated, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Mann Whitney U test were used. According to the results of the study, although the pre-school teachers perceive themselves highly adequate in exhibiting thinking supportive behaviours, the dimension in which the pre-school teachers perceive themselves as the most inadequate is “reflecting through documentation”. The pre-school teachers’ thinking supportive behaviours were found to be not varying significantly depending on “the number of students in the class” and “having a person helping them in the class”. The teachers’ thinking supportive behaviours were found to vary significantly depending on the variables of “having received training on thinking skills”, “having received training about programs such as Regio Emilia/High Scope” and “having enough space for each student in the class” in the sub-dimension of “reflecting through documentation”. Moreover, the scores taken from the sub-dimensions and the whole scale were found to vary significantly depending on the variable of “the type of institution worked”. In light of the findings of the study, some suggestions were made.

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