In the last decades parents, teachers and educators in general have been feeling an increasing concern about students disruptive behaviour in schools. Underlying these concerns are the growing number of students with disruptive behaviour, the severity of these behaviours, and their manifestation in ever younger pupils. This article presents a descriptive and exploratory study designed to explore teachers’ conceptions of classroom disruption. A set of situations containing classroom disruptive behaviours were created and later presented to teachers of grades seven to nine in schools of Ponta Delgada, Açores. We aimed at finding out which of these situations teachers considered more severe in terms of disruption, which factors they believed were more influential, and what kind of interventions they considered more appropriate to deal with those situations.
Classroom disruptive behavior; behavior in school; teacher’s evaluation
