Adversity Quotient and Classroom Management among Iranian EFL Teachers: An Analysis of Personality Styles

Personality types and professional/psychological attributes of teachers have long been the subject of extended debate and research in all fields of education, including ELT. Accordingly, the focus of this study was to investigate the relationship between introvert and extrovert EFL teachers’ adversity quotient and their effective classroom management. To this end, the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) was distributed among 200 teachers who volunteered to participate in this study and ultimately the 60 teachers who were introverts and the 60 who were extroverts were chosen for the study. All the participants were 30 females and 30 males aged 25-50 with at least three years of teaching experience in different language schools in Tehran. The Adversity Quotient Profile (AQP) was administered among these 120 participants and each teacher’s class was subsequently observed by the researchers through which the teacher’s classroom management was assessed using Murdoch’s (2000) Checklist. To find out the relationship between the two main variables of this study, both descriptive and inferential statistics including Pearson Correlation and linear regression were carried out. The results showed that both introvert and extrovert teachers’ AQ was a significant predictor of their classroom management. These findings reveal that teachers’ AQ is possibly a more decisive factor predicting their classroom management than their extroversion/introversion.