Peaceful and Happy Schools: How to Build Positive Learning Environments

It is very important for students and teachers to have a peaceful school learning environment. However, the issue of how to make the school more peaceful has often been a challenging subject of discussion due to the presence of home environments with challenging socio-economic conditions and student characteristics. Peace begins in trusting hearts. Teachers who build trust act in an intercultural context. They see the student as a whole with the size of body, mind and heart. Principles such as love, respect, honesty, courage, empathy and kindness are important for teachers in peaceful schools. In these schools, students are the central focus of a peaceful school community. It is thought that schools should be a peaceful and happy environment as the places where children are educated. For this reason, this study examined the concept of “peaceful and happy school” and aimed to describe peaceful school from the point of view of elementary school teachers and elementary school students. The research is a descriptive qualitative study. Working group, 103 primary school students and 27 primary school teachers from public schools in E…. the city center. Semi-structured interview form was used for both groups. In the study, which used content analysis technique, themes were created for data analysis in line with the research questions. The codes obtained were placed in the themes considering their relationship with each other and with other codes. In this study, excerpts from the sentences of students and teachers are included. At the end of the study, the definition of peaceful and happy school was made according to elementary school students and primary school teachers and their suggestions were determined to create peaceful and happy school.