Supporting self-regulation in the preschool period: A case study of teachers' practices

Self-regulation, which is also evaluated as children’s ability to direct their attention, emotions, and behaviors towards learning tasks, forms the basis of healthy social and academic development from early ages. This study aims to investigate the attention, emotion, and behavior regulation practices for self-regulation in the preschool period from the perspective of teachers. A qualitative research design employing a case study approach was used. The study included 22 participants. A semi-structured interview form consisting of two sections was used as the data collection tool in the research. In the first part of the research form, demographic questions about participants’ age, professional experience, education level, and the type of institution they worked, were included. The second part of the research form included experience-based questions aimed to examine the practices that participants applied for attention regulation, emotion regulation and behavior regulation. The data obtained were gathered under three themes as attention regulation, emotion regulation and behavior regulation. The findings of the study revealed that preschool teachers conducted self-regulation activities in class for attention regulation, emotion regulation and behavior regulation. The preschool teachers mostly carried out classroom activities such as games, drama, stories, free time, and music in the classroom. They used different strategies to enable children to be actively involved, take responsibility in these activities, and carried out practices that would create a positive classroom atmosphere for teacher-child and child-child interaction.