Author(s): Dr. Adalet KANDIR, Dr. Saide ÃZBEY, Ar.Gör. Gözde NAL
Both teacher characteristics and professional knowledge and skills are required for teachers to offer quality preschool education. Even though teachers may know the basics of planning educational contexts, various reasons may bring them face to face with difficulties in planning and implementation. When such diffculties arise, support should be provided to teachers according to their needs so that quality preschool curricula emerge. Starting from this need, the present study aims to reveal the difficulties faced by preschool teachers in the planning and implementation of curricula and to offer suggestions accordingly. The study sample consisted of a total of 154 teachers working at private and official preschool education institutions in Ankara and Afyon. Data was collected by using a questionnaire with two sections. It included questions about teachers’ personal information and their views on planning educational contexts. The general data pertaining to teachers was analyzed with percentile and frequency values while Chi-Square test was used to analyze whether the teachers’ views on planning educational contexts varied with respect to variables such as their professional seniority, the institution they are working for and the type of school they graduated from. The results showed that the biggest difficulties teachers faced in preparing annual plans were distributing objectives and achievements over the year and evaluating the annual plan. At the same time, teachers were also found to experience difficulties with planning and evaluating the educational context in their daily plans. The first and foremost difficulty in connection with planning educational contexts seemed to be big class size, followed by materials selection and design, arranging the educational context, lack of physical facilities, attitude of families, selecting methods and techniques, respectively. A meaningful difference was also found between the type of institution that teachers were working for and the difficulties that arose when planning educational contexts (p<0,05). In light of these results, it may be suggested that the quality of education will be maximized if the size of preschool classes is reduced and the number of preschools increased; if school administrators are informed and appropriate measures are taken to improve the physical condition of classrooms such as space, materials, temperature and lighting, the lack of which may pose major problems in planning and implementing curricula; if preservice teachers, who initially experience more difficulties than senior teachers with regard to physical conditions, are taken to preschools with a diversity of conditions for their practice teaching during their university education so that they gain a multitude of rich experiences.
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