Practices of early childhood teachers for managing behavioural problems in the classrooms of Zambian early childhood centres

The purpose of this study was to investigate the practices of early childhood teachers for managing early childhood behavioural problems in Zambian early childhood schools. The objective of the study was to identify the most common behavioural problems exhibited by pre-school children and investigate what classroom management strategy are used by the teachers to manage the problematic behaviours. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. The sample consisted of 77 Early Childhood Care and Development teachers. The research used the list of Preschool Teachers’ Practices, the list of Behavioural Problems and Semi Structured Questionnaire to investigate the most common problematic behaviours in pre-school, the classroom management strategies used and investigate what strategies are used to manage specific kinds of behaviour. Basic descriptive and moderation analysis was used to analyse the data. The results indicate that teachers experience more overt aggression problematic behaviour in early childhood schools. Further, the results showed that teachers tend to use more of proactive classroom management strategies (M = 36.72) than reactive management strategies (M = 31.72) to manage problematic behaviours in class. There was no statistically significant difference in the score for age, gender and experience regarding teacher’s practices. However, a one way ANOVA showed that the effect of educational level of teachers on reactive strategies was statistically significant, F (3,63) = 3.93, p = 0.01 and there was also statistically significant for proactive classroom management strategy, F (3, 63) = 5.81, p = 0.01. Further, results indicate that the management strategy used depends on the type of behaviour