Teachers’ principles of decision-making and classroom management; a case study and a new observation method

Through their profession, teachers are continuously confronted with challenging situations that demand decision making. Our subject of interest was to explore the logic of teachers’ action in their classroom management. In the first part of the paper, we will discuss the theoretical framework in the light of Symbolic Interactionism and Classic Pragmatism. In the second part, we will present our case study which aims to examine why a teacher acts in a certain way when faced with disturbances, and thereby what are the teacher's principles of decision-making in classroom management situations. The empirical material was acquired by video recording and interviewing three primary school teachers. The results can be illustrated through six principles: knowledge of pupils, teacher personality, emotional state, caring, educational uniqueness, and the school's operational environment and the social context. In the third part, we will introduce a more updated methodological point of view and explore future perspectives of the upcoming research settings. Our new technical approach enables the examination of the teacher's verbal and nonverbal communication and the combining of linguistic, visual and heart rate variation analysis.