A Case Study Of Discipline In Junior Kindergarten

Discipline education is an important way to promote the socialization of preschool children, and promoting preschool children’s self-discipline is the highest goal of discipline education. Advanced and mainstream theories of early childhood education advocated respect for the children, emphasizing that teachers should treat children as equal. However, although after the outline and the guide have been issued, our country has invested a lot of funds for kindergarten teacher training so as to disseminate advanced views of children and education, research has shown that, kindergarten teacher education methods have changed little. Existing literature on discipline education are either ideas put forward by foreign famous educators and psychologists, or comments and suggestions the current situation of education of China, which are made by domestic researchers according to foreign advanced review of education. By far, in-depth researches about the present situation of the discipline in kindergarten, which include teachers’ concept of discipline education, discipline education behavior and the factors influencing teachers’ behaviors in discipline education are still quite lacking. In China’s reality, how do kindergarten teachers discipline children? What is their perception of discipline education? Can they well accept advanced education idea and put them into practice? What outside factors are limiting their discipline education? These problems need further research. All these problems remains to be seen. Therefore, this research is conducted in order to fill the blank of these studies.The research utilizes qualitative research methods. The researchers went to a kindergarten in Shenzhen to do research. Each of the three junior classes in this kindergarten were observed for three weeks and interviews were done separately with all of the six teachers. The observation content is teachers’ discipline behavior and the situation at that time.During the observation period, the researcher took every opportunity, such as lunch time, making manual and finishing materials of the region, to have informal interviews with kindergarten teachers, asking the purpose, experiences and ideas in some specific discipline education of the day. After getting their answers, record was made as soon as possible, and organized them in the evening. In addition, the researchers conducted two formal interview with each of the six kindergarten teachers separately, each interview taking about 40 minutes.The research result shows that kindergarten teachers’ ideas of goals in discipline include:to ensure the safety of children, to cultivate children good learning and behavior habits, to ensure that activities go smoothly, and to promote children’s social adaption and help young children learn self management, etc. The discipline methods kindergarten teachers approve include:positive education as major education method while negative education as complementary, helping children to understand the meaning of rules, making children " love yet afraid", preaching and remind, etc. Difficulties and confusion of kindergarten teachers in discipline education include: children with behavior problems are difficult to discipline, the lack of enough time to solve the causes of problems and the contradiction between young children’s freedom and class management, etc. And the discipline education in the kindergarten teachers "action" requires children to follow instructions, great importance is attached to the classroom order and to ensure that children obey the class rules. Teacher’s discipline education is restricted by the expectations of parents, the requirements of the leadership of the kindergarten and teacher’s own factors.From research on teachers’ "ideas" and "action" in discipline education, the researcher found that kindergarten teachers can understand advanced education ideas and are willing to put them into practice. However, there are some deficiencies:In teachers’ "ideas", they believe that positive education should be priority to negative education and that self-discipline is priority to heteronomy. But in their "action", they use a lot of negative education and heteronomy. According to the research results, some suggestions are given to kindergarten leaders, teachers and parents.