Browsing by Author "Pelkonen, Pihla"

Teachers often find classroom management challenging and it is usually also one of the main concerns for novice teachers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the construction of pedagogical authority. Another research topic was classroom management and challenges experienced in it. The analysis of the research focused on interviews with both novice teachers and teachers with longer experience in the field. The study was carried out as a qualitative study. The material of the research consisted of interviews with a total of eight classroom teachers, four where in the early stages of their career and the other four had more than ten years of experience working as classroom teachers. The interviews were conducted as semi-structured, and the transcribed material was analyzed by data-driven content analysis. The results are based on four main categories formed by content analysis. Pedagogical authority and classroom management went hand in hand in the results of the research, and four different categories can be outlined in the structure of the category. These were the systematicity of the teacher's activities, the teacher-student relationship, the certainty brought by work experience and well-being at work. Through systematic activities, teachers create structure to the classroom, which helps students in turn to get used to working separately through routines. The interaction between the teacher and the student is of great importance for the creation of a mutual trust relationship. Also well-being at work and the skills gained through work experience appear as factors affecting pedagogical authority and classroom management. The most significant research results were the struggle experienced by novice teachers between the gentleness and strictness of their actions, and the perceptions of experienced teachers about the deterioration of the mental and physical health of children and young people which affected to their experiences of changed classroom dynamics.