A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF THE TEACHER VIEWS ON THE CLASSROOM FREEDOM AND STUDENT-TEACHER CLASSROOM INTERACTION

Abstract

Education is the process of facilitating learning or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits and only the teacher can facilitates learning by making the classroom effective. In schools, the importance of classroom freedom becomes even greater as it provides the children the opportunity to open up , removes their doubts, finds it convenient to overcome any kind of hesitation and develop a ‘we’ feeling essentially needed. Focus groups were used to obtain participants views about the classroom freedom. The participants were 15 primary school teachers teaching in R.R.K. school of Moradabad district U.P.  who had teaching experience of minimum 2 years selected by using  simple random sampling technique and two sections of  5^th class of R.R.K. school were selected  using convenient sampling technique. To analyze the data, code and categories focus group data were adapted from approaches to qualitative data analysis. The participants were interviewed using semi structured questionnaire to assess teacher’s views on classroom freedom and the non participatory observation checklists were observed on both the sections of 5^th class (ten classes -5 per section) for about 20 minutes each class to determine student- teacher classroom interaction. Four themes emerged from the focus group data, from the participants ' point of view," teachers views regarding classroom freedom ", "teachers behaviour "," students behaviour ", classroom interaction ", were considered as important factors in teachers views about the classroom freedom. Findings from the selected 15 participants viewed that classroom freedom was  necessary to manage the class as well to make the teaching -learning process effective and results based on the non participatory observation checklist were , the student teacher classroom interaction was  appreciable as teachers were  giving reinforcement, creating democratic environment in the class, whereas, the students were responding well  towards teachers question and overall classroom interaction was effective on all the parameters.  Hence, the study concluded that, class-room freedom is essentially required for   keeping   students'   academic   interest   alive.  It   not only   increases the creativity of the students in general, it also allows the struggling students to open up. The study recommended that an experimental study can be undertaken to study the impact of classroom freedom on the students’ performance.