We are living in a time of changes, which are happening in all areas of our lives. The increase in knowledge and the development of technology require us to make changes in the school environment as well. The teacher is placed in a position, where he has to fulfil his educational as well as parenting function. In accordance with various educational theories, a teacher must possess authority for teaching. Challenging the teacher's authority by the pupils is the teacher's everyday experience. Whether the teacher will know how, be willing and able to establish himself as the person responsible for order and discipline in the classroom is not self-evident. In fact, it could be said that this is one of the more difficult elements in education today. Establishing authority is particularly challenging for teachers, who are just starting out in their careers and who face many obstacles in doing so.
In the introductory theoretical part of the master's thesis I focused on the definition of authority and the different types of teacher's authority according to Bernstein, on discipline and punishment, and on teacher's professional development. For my master's thesis, novice teachers who have been teaching for no more than three years were relevant. The purpose of my research was to determine out how teachers at the beginning of their professional career cope with the challenge of authority and how well they were educated on topic in college. I was interested in what strategies of discipline they use and to what reasons they attribute the decline of discipline in schools. I chose to focus on novice teachers because I am one myself and we are also witnessing a rise in permissive education nowdays. The primary school teacher is in a special position, because in the early years of schooling it is still possible to influence the upbringing of pupils and to make up for what may have been lost in the pre-school period. With my master's thesis, I want to raise awareness that authority is indispensable for the development and existence of society.
178 novice teachers participated in the empirical part of the master's thesis. The results showed that they rated medium satisfaction with the knowledge they received at the faculty on establishing authority, and they rated their competence to maintain authority in the classroom also as medium. The biggest problems for them are short and clear instructions, and the fact that they give in too quickly to pupils. The most common way of maintaining discipline in the classroom for them is to transfer disruptive pupils or to inform their parents. The decline in discipline in schools is attributed to the phenomenon of permissiveness in the society and to insufficient teacher's competence to exercise authority. In accordance with some previous studies involving a population of teachers at a specific school, an unexpected result is that among the surveyed teachers, authoritative type of authority is the most common among beginners. I have analysed and explained this result in more detail in the empirical part of the master's thesis.
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