Abstract:

Teachers’ beliefs shape their decisions, and therefore have profound implications for the classroom. In particular, their beliefs related to their self-efficacy influence their own and their pupils’ performances. Another factor that strongly affects classroom processes is classroom management, and research shows that there is a relationship between teachers’ classroom-management skills and their self-efficacy beliefs. Accordingly, this study examines the self-efficacy beliefs of pre-service preschool teachers concerning their classroom-management skills. The purposefully selected sample consisted of 52 pre-service preschool teachers who had taken courses of Classroom Management, School Experience, and Practice Teaching-1, and data was collected using a semi-structured interview protocol developed by the researcher. For qualitative data analysis, the cutting and sorting technique was used. This identified four main themes of the respondents’ self-efficacy beliefs that related to classroom management: (1) organization of the physical environment, (2) designing and supervising of activities, (3) implementation of rules and (4) classroom management considered as a whole. The results indicated that 69.2% of the sampled pre-service teachers believed that they were efficient at organizing the physical environment of a preschool classroom, while 50% emphasized that they were efficient at planning and implementing instructional activities. Most participants (82.7%) also believed that they were efficient at implementing classroom rules effectively. However, when they considered classroom management as a whole, 51.9% of participants stated that they were only partially efficient.

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