ABSTRACT

Background: School climate is crucial: its character can affect pupils’ academic achievement, teachers’ working conditions and the wellbeing of everyone at school. A major concern for teachers is how to prevent and manage disruptive behaviours. Against this backdrop, there is a need for thorough investigation of pupils’ perspectives to better understand their perceptions of the climate at their schools and their views about why disruptive behaviours occur.

Purpose: In this small-scale, qualitative study, we aimed to contribute to the body of school climate research by exploring pupils’ perspectives on school climate, teachers and relationships at school.

Method: We conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis, exploring pupils’ perspectives on these issues through focus group interviews. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted (n = 104) with grade 1–9 (7- to 15-year-old) pupils from a school in Sweden. The interview guide included questions about sense of safety, relationships at school and in classrooms, and pupils’ views of teachers. Constructivist grounded theory was used as the analytical framework.

Findings: A recurrent pattern identified in the data was the focus on disruptive behaviours and how these were connected to the pupils’ learning environment, sense of safety and teachers. Three core categories were conceptualised from the pupils’ perspectives: (a) within-pupil explanations, (b) teaching style explanations and (c) peer group process explanations. We adopted a social-ecological approach to conceptualise the complexities and interplay of factors addressed by the pupils in their perspectives on disruptive behaviours.

Conclusions: Our findings provide insight into the way that different factors interplay in the emergence of disruptive behaviours in the classroom, nested within both contextual and structural aspects. This analysis of pupil perspectives also points to the importance of a whole-school approach in which teachers establish a warm, responsive and confident teaching style in the classroom and in the playground to influence the social dynamics.

摘要

背景：学校氛围至关重要：其特点会影响学生的学业成绩、教师的工作条件和学校每个人的福祉。教师的一个主要关注点是如何预防和管理破坏性行为。在此背景下，有必要对学生的观点进行彻底调查，以更好地了解他们对学校气候的看法以及他们对破坏性行为发生原因的看法。

目的：在这项小规模的定性研究中，我们旨在通过探索学生对学校气候、教师和学校关系的看法，为学校气候研究的主体做出贡献。

方法：我们进行了深入的定性分析，通过焦点小组访谈来探索学生对这些问题的看法。对瑞典一所学校的 1-9 年级（7 至 15 岁）学生进行了 18 次半结构化访谈（n = 104）。面试指南包括关于安全感、学校和课堂关系以及学生对老师的看法的问题。建构主义扎根理论被用作分析框架。

结果：数据中发现的一个反复出现的模式是关注破坏性行为，以及这些行为与学生的学习环境、安全感和教师之间的关系。从学生的角度概念化了三个核心类别：(a) 学生内部解释，(b) 教学风格解释和 (c) 同龄人过程解释。我们采用了一种社会生态方法来概念化学生在他们对破坏性行为的看法中所解决的因素的复杂性和相互作用。

结论：我们的研究结果提供了洞察不同因素在课堂中破坏性行为的出现中相互作用的方式，嵌套在上下文和结构方面。这种对学生观点的分析还指出了全校教学法的重要性，在这种教学法中，教师在课堂和操场上建立一种热情、反应灵敏和自信的教学风格，以影响社会动态。