4.4. The personal experience of supervisors in
behaviour management
Eleven interviewees (73%) admitted that they had
had difficult personal experiences with behaviour
problems when they had been schoolteachers,
before they became supervisors. Most of them had
had difficulties in coping with behaviour problems
in their first years as teachers. They expressed
themselves in phrases such as: ‘‘I cried day and
night,’’ ‘‘I felt very lonely! Very lonelyy’’ ‘‘They
were like lions that had broken out of their cages.’’
In addition, unsolved behaviour problems were
experienced later by some of the interviewees. Some
of them admitted that they, too, do not cope well
with these problems: ‘‘When I face such behaviour,
I have to be highly concentrated, and I keep
thinking, ‘what can I do now that will be effective
latery what can I do nowy?’’, and, ‘‘Coping with
behaviour problems is very challenging for me’’.
Seven (47%) of the interviewees claimed that
dealing with behaviour problems had caused them
to be uncertain about their suitability to teach and
that they had thought about leaving the profession:
‘‘I was surrounded by teachers. They gave instructions
and advice, but I felt constantly criticized by
parents, by society, by the teaching team and even
by myself, and I doubted whether I had chosen the
right profession. I survived, but hardly. I hardly
survived’’. Another interviewee said, ‘‘You ask
yourself unconsciously—have I made the right
choice?’’ Some of them admitted that they had left
teaching and had become teacher educators because
they did not succeed in coping with behaviour
problems. One of the interviewees presented it
sharply. ‘‘I am telling you this with a most
uncomfortable feeling, I am the one who educates
them to reach a place from which I ran away, and it
sounds bad, indeed; this has happened to all the
supervisors, not only to mey. One by one, each of
us ran awayy’’. Others presented the scenario more
carefully: ‘‘In my last year I had a pupily He
almost forced me to retire from teaching; I was very
close to retirement;’’ she meant retiring from
teaching at school and becoming a supervisor.
Ducharme (1993) has presented similar findings.
Those interviewees who did not report difficulties in
dealing with behavioural problems when they had
been teachers (27% of the interviewees) were no
different from the other supervisors. They, too, did
not relate to behavioural problems which came up
during the lessons of student teachers, or to the
student teacher’s reactions.