Preschool teacher strategies for solving conflict situations among children

Abstract

This study focuses on interaction of a teacher and a child in kindergarten in the situations that we can perceive as conflicting communication among children in preschool environment. For the purpose of this study, we consider a situation to be perceived as conflicting when two or more children have a misunderstanding caused by the non-conformance of their interests in the kindergarten class. The aim of qualitatively oriented research is to find out how the teachers perceive a conflict, what situations they describe and how they choose strategies in these situations. The data was obtained through participatory observation in four different classes of kindergarten, with six teachers of these classes who also underwent an in-depth interview. The transcripts passed then through the open encoding and category creation. The results show that only some teachers include the child's view of the situation in their strategy; their decisions are mainly based on the assumed social skills of children, where active participation in the solution of the situation is expected from children over 5 years of age. A frequent case is the "no discussion" teacher's strategy, when the conflict situation is solved only by teacher's own decided interference thus the children remain in a passive role. (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy ww.FutureAcademy.org .UK