The Effect of Class Management Types (Authoritative, Democratic, Laissez-faire) on Teacher Professional Development among Iranian EFL Teachers

Abstract

In general, professional development (PD) is the development of an individual in his/her professional role (Villegas-Reimers, 2003). On the other hand, classroom management can be demarcated as series of tools or procedures that an instructor used in his class to provide an organized class for learning, as Smith and Laslett, (2002, p. 3). Regarding the importance of these two concepts, the present study sought to find out whether there is any relationship between these two concepts among Iranian English language teachers. In this study, 60 English language teachers from different language schools in Tehran, Iran were selected as the participants. The Professional Development Questionnaire (Varies, Jansen & Grift, 2013) was used as the instrument in this study. After sampling the participants, they were divided randomly into four groups: three as experimental groups and one as control group. In the three experimental groups, each group consisting of 15 teachers were asked to adopt one of the class management styles (authoritative, democratic, laissez faire). After data collection, the data were analyzed in the software SPSS and ANOVA was run. The results showed that a significant difference was observed between all three experimental groups and the control group. Besides, each classroom management style had a significant effect on teachers’ PD. In other words, the null hypothesis of the study is rejected and it can be said that different types of class management styles had a significant effect on teachers’ PD. The present study could add some valuable results to the related literature on WTC and class management styles. Thus, English language teachers and teacher educators are addressed by the results of the present study to put much focus on class management style.