EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EARLY CHILDHOOD IN-SERVICE TEACHERS' CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AND SELF-REGULATION SKILLS

Self-regulation skills allow individuals to control emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. Teachers' management of their behaviors, emotions, and thoughts could impact their classroom management too. Thus, teachers' self-regulation and classroom management relationships were analyzed in the study. To date, emotional regulation was studied, but self-regulation has not been studied in classroom management context. The study was designed as a quantitative study. Two hundred forty-four early childhood in-service teachers participated in the study. Correlation tests were used to analyze gathering data. The study result shows that self-regulation skills and classroom management are not correlated. On the other hand, there is a relationship between all three sub dimensions of self-regulation (self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement) and classroom management skills. The study result suggests that the early childhood teachers' self-reinforcement is positively correlated with classroom management skills. In addition, self-evaluation and self-monitoring are negatively correlated with classroom management. The study recommends that the teachers could increase their classroom management skills with internal or external rewards. Furthermore, the teachers can use some standard grade scales to observe whether they have misconceptions about classroom management strategies objectively.   Article visualizations: