Communication Conflicts Between Teachers and Administrators

Abstract

The communication, as a factor uniting people and enabling them to act together, needs to be used functionally in educational organizations consisting of people who have come together to achieve a certain goal. It is important to have two-way communication between administrators and teachers in schools. For more effective and quality service in schools, good communication between administrators and teachers should be established. Achieving the desired goals will be difficult in schools where effective communication cannot be established. This is a qualitative study on the problems teachers face while communicating with school principals. The subject of the research will be the stories of teachers about the problems they experience in their communication with school principals. The study group of the research consists of teachers working in Yenimahalle district of Ankara province. After the collected stories were transcribed in computer environment (data transcription), descriptive analysis of the data was conducted. For the validity of the data analysis, the stories told by the participants were kept as they were, the consistency of the codes and subcategories with the stories told by the participants was observed, and some stories were directly quoted.

The findings of this study show that the difference in status poses a problem in the communication between teachers and administrators and that teachers express that administrators misperceive them. According to the study, theteachers and administrators have communication problems due to lack of empathy.  In order to solve these problems, it is recommended to provide training to improve empathy skills, and to use clear expressions in response to misunderstandings and misunderstandings of administrators and teachers.