Contributing Factors To High School Students' Disciplinary Problems And Their Intervention Strategies.A Lesson From Eritrea

Since the past two decades,Eritrean high schools have been challenged with a speedy growing students' disciplinary problems.The school's stakeholders continuously blame each other in the case of students' indiscipline in schools.Therefore,this study aimed to investigate factors contributing to high school students'disciplinary problems,and the possible interventions that the schools in collaboration with the stakeholders' practice.The researcher selected five secondary schools from the Adikeih sub-region of the southern region of Eritrea.The populations of the study were schools' principals,teachers,parents(who are currently working as PTSA members),students and school counselors of one school for the focus group discussion.To carry out this study,the researcher employed a qualitative research design where the relevant data were collected using an instrument of semi-structured interviews and by conducting a focus group discussion.The researcher with the collaboration of a former head department back home have thoroughly investigated,coded and categorized the responses to explore the thematic areas that emerged from the data and then analyzed the data using top-down or theoretical thematic data analysis.Three important domains were explored as the main sources of factors contributing to students' indiscipline(i.e.student-related factors,home-related factors,and school-related factors).The study revealed that every stakeholder of the teaching and learning practices has his or her trouble making contributing factors for the students' disciplinary problems.The schools under the study follow different techniques to prevent and or avoid students' disciplinary problems in their schools.The findings of the study also revealed some ineffective disciplining strategies that their schools follow.Understanding the contributing factors of students' disciplinary problems by the schools' stakeholders will eventually pave ways to develop effective strategies of avoiding and preventing students' indiscipline.Moreover,the findings of the study also indicated that the involvement of students,teachers,parents as well as other stakeholders during disciplinary planning and implementation stages of the schools is the responsibility of schools' principals and can escalate the effectiveness of the prevention and avoidance of schools' disciplinary problems.