Abstract:

Elective courses have a place in education as they provide a relatively more democratic condition for the learner. However, alongside being important, they also reveal certain problems. The reason for their being also problematic is related to these: the fact that which packages are available within the existing pool of such courses and also which one or ones are to be selected pertain to a rather political issue. In other words, the selection of one or more courses provided-and not choosing the others-is linked to a political process. The one who makes this political choice is important -namely is decision making process managed by learners themselves, his parents, or both; or is it the school administrator or the relevant teachers who are guiding the process matters here. What courses will be available for learners in elective courses pool, their planning process with the selection process are concentrated upon with a view to comprehend how much workload these processes would correspond to on the administrator’s side and more importantly, what problems administrators confront in these regards and to this end what kind of solutions are resorted to are focused on.In this study, the design of case study, one of the qualitative designs, was used. The school administrators of 15 secondary schools in Tokat province, who were responsible for elective courses, were interviewed in 2014-2015 academic year. 3 of these administrators were school principals while the rest were assistant principals. The principals were coded as M1, M2…, and the assistant principals were coded as MY1, MY2. The data were collected using semi-structured interview form. It was observed that the majority of schools had some problems such as the insufficient number of classrooms and physical structure. It can be expressed that nearly half of these schools had sufficient number of teachers for elective courses, and when they didn’t, the problem was resolved by assignments from other schools. As a result, it can be stated that these schools didn’t have serious problems about this issue.