The purpose of our research was to highlight the problematics of establishing authority of the primary school teachers and to determine in what manner teachers react in situations that undermine their authority. We also wanted to reveal how teacher’s authority is experienced and valued by pupils, and if the opinions of teachers and students differ. The main purpose of our empirical research was to compare the different types of establishing authority of teachers in elementary schools and to determine if, and in which way, the teachers react in the situations that undermine their authority. We were interested in identifying existence of teachers with different ways of establishing authority within the particular elementary school, and to inspect to what extent these potential differences in the educational attitudes of the teachers are perceived by pupils. To this end, we conducted an empirical survey using a quantitative method of collecting data with a questionnaire for teachers and students, using convenience sampling at one of the suburban primary schools in Slovenia. We also intended to define what is the symbolic perception of a teacher with an established authority – both, from the perspective of the surveyed teachers, as well as from the perspective of the surveyed pupils, and for this purpose we included the question of an open type in the questionnaire, which required them to write down three characteristics of a teacher with an established authority. According to the results teachers have labelled consistency and professionalism in the first two places, while students opted for kindness and strictness as the two of the most significant characteristics of a teacher with established authority. Questions in the survey questionnaire also investigated the potential correlation between the type of authority of teachers and their strategy of calming disruptive pupils, but the obtained data did not show a specific pattern of connection between the routines of calming disruptive students and sets of indicators that define a certain type of teacher’s authority. The results obtained by factor analysis of sets of indicators for defining types of teacher's authority confirmed the existence of three main types of teacher’s authority and a clear correlation between the foreseen theoretical frameworks of a particular type of authority of the teacher.
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