Education's Ecology

Why Teaching, Textbooks, Testing & Technology are Not Enough.

Chapter V

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding; teaching. I went to teach math to seventh graders in the New York Public Schools.

Angela Duckworth

Classroom Management

The first thing a teacher must do to teach is let the classroom participants know that they must sit down, sit still and shut up. That is the beginning of classroom management. Fortunately for teachers most kids get the idea quickly. But more than occasionally a few don’t

Teachers are hired to manage classrooms. Think about this. In public schools the administrators assess the number of students, pupils, learners, scholars—call these young people or whatever you find comfortable—they are labels for units that must be processed everyday to some end vaguely defined as “learning.” What ever “learning” is it is supposed to happen in a classroom and is generally regarded as unable to happen unless the decorum and activities of the people in a classroom are managed. Accordingly the school administrator at some level or another, most typically the school principal, must hire another class of people to fulfill the requirements for classroom management of decorum and learning—in that order.

The language surrounding a teacher's position may convey something couched in the language of pedagogy, but the usually implicit or occasionally explicit message is about management. At some level those who are hired have been trained to manage classrooms, sufficiently skilled in all manner of methods, to deliver a proscribed curriculum to a group of age-matched people. Successful management is judged by a supervisor, typically a principal. The judgment is based on a broad set of characteristics related to pedagogy. In the absence of a judgment that classroom management has been adequate, employment as a teacher may be terminated. In the worst case a popular teacher may be promoted to a new level of incompetence to supervise other teachers; the expectation that popularity will maybe rub off on others.

Though a teacher may declare that they are not in a popularity contest, their rhetoric may shroud their deep sense of knowing better. Typically these teachers are superb classroom managers labeling what they do as “character building,” which is loosely defined under a rubric of “discipline.” What ever the subject to be taught, the first step in teaching is to require discipline and get it with personality adjustments that begin with the teacher, attitudes and all, that make top down autocratic discipline de rigueur, current classroom etiquette. Imagine the growing chaos if this were not so.

To label teachers as classroom managers is likely to be seen as pejorative. It certainly will be and perhaps should be seen that way by active teachers, particularly in the K-12 sector of education. I will argue that it applies no less to faculty in institutions of higher education, with some space left open for graduate faculty who are also engaged in research and service. Their teaching is quite different from colleagues assigned to teaching undergraduate courses. Even at some of our major universities graduate faculty will encounter an occasional assignment to teach a large lecture course to first or second year students. It is also noteworthy that a few high flyers in academia actually seek assignment to teach a large enrollment course. Robert Sapulsky at Stanford is one such example. For a time just before receipt of the Nobel Prize for the DNA double helix model, James Watson, taught the beginning undergraduate biology course at Harvard.

Faculty at community and technical colleges are most assuredly tasked with classroom management, although their students, much like those at university rarely require behavior interventions and management. Management may focus much more on retention as many students at two-year institutions are prone to drop out. Retention efforts occurs through meeting the myriad remedial and personal needs of their students. Those attendance rules, schedules, assignment due dates, assigned reading, test dates and grade requirements distributed on the first day of class—as a syllabus—are notable as management documents.

Lee Iacocca said management is nothing more than motivating other people. As a corporate CEO at Ford and Crysler, Iacocca possessed motivational tools not available to any classroom teacher. He passed out money, lots of money, every Friday afternoon with an infectious smile. He got what he wanted; productivity. Although paying kids to behave and learn has been tried, Friday always seems too far off to matter. Friday signals a break in the classroom routine, and something fun is expected to follow with friends and family—a break from management.

Motivation through reward and punishment was brought into classrooms along with some of the early teaching machines developed by B.F. Skinner. Kids in class were regarded, not always light-heartedly, as larger version of lab rats and pigeons without wings. The paddle hanging on the wall behind the teachers desk was a frequent reminder of consequences of misbehavior. Its use by more than one or two horrific examples, was enough to keep all of the class well managed. This “lesson” could include failing to deliver an on-time assignment or simply not remembering a detail from a prior lesson that a teacher expected to be remembered because s/he told the class to remember it.

Time Management is the province of the teacher in a classroom. When a pupil attempts to take over the time frame for a scheduled activity through a behavioral outburst or deviation from expected norms, the teacher is duty bound to bring the schedule back in line with the allocation of time for what has been planned for the day.

A first rule of management is to delegate. Teachers delegate the “learning” task to their students. There is little or nothing the teacher can do if the pupil is unwilling to put forth the effort in the form of attention and choice to concentrate on practicing a skill or memorizing a fact in whatever form that may be designated by a teacher to take. For instance, memorization of a poem, a formula or a table of facts may take a different form from participation in a project. But in either case it is the teacher who stipulates what the student is to do and places an objective on what is to be done by the student. A new and popular learning tool, Project-based learning or PBL, simply shifts the activity—not the role of the teacher in managing what happens in a classroom.

In emphasizing their management role, I may seem by certain readers straying too far away from mainstream thinking about the role of teachers, particularly regarding their lofty status as champions of kids and sterling examples of scholarship. Let's look at what some literature from education has to say about classroom management.

The search (7/5/2021) of ERIC using descriptors Classroom Management yielded 16,321 articles … of which 8,061 were peer-reviewed journal articles … 6,094 were on classroom techniques, 3,922 described teaching methods, 3,275 focused on elementary and secondary education, and 2,075 dealt with teacher attitudes. Interestingly 2,037 involved classroom management in higher education.

From the above it is hard to avoid a conclusion that classroom management is a ubiquitous concern for educators. This concern is certainly not confined to the United States as there were 3,115 citations from foreign countries.

One paper's abstract (#) mentioned “ traditional domains of classroom management” that were contrasted with “cultural responsiveness.” Classrooms with low levels of classroom management were more likely to demonstrate elevated levels of negative behaviors. This paper included a line about “teacher's classroom management profiles.” These profiles include establishing expectations, monitoring student behavior, anticipating and reacting to student needs. “Effective management” techniques have been associated with student achievement, productivity and accuracy of student work, decreases in off-task and disruptive behavior, higher levels of classroom engagement and attention, and more pro-social behavior and positive peer relationships among students. These authors state “Although classroom management strategies differ from pedagogical techniques, classroom management and academic instruction are inherently linked … the need for reactive classroom management is reduced as instructional quality increases (Gay, 2006 is cited)”

Establishing and enforcing expectations is regarded as an important matter for being culturally aware and responsive. This loads on the back of teachers a host of practices such a communicating with cultural consistency, incorporating family backgrounds and building personal relationships. In other words socio-cultural participation in an authentic environment. The goal, of course, is to reduce racial and social injustices in the classroom. These practices are laden with overtones of a predominantly white environment.

In addressing the matter of socio-cultural teaching and its relevance to Native American students, Kaylee Domzalski wrote:

Cultrually responsive teaching or culturally sustaining teaching is really about what we teach and how we teach diverse populations. It's a combination of pedagogy, curriculum, actual instructional delivery, but also thte attitudes and belief I think that we bring to the classroom. (emphasis added) And really it's about a responsibility to know, understand, respect the various backgrounds, cultural heritage, sociopolitical [orientation]—whatever it is students bring to the classroom—and to have an awareness of that and to utilize students' prior knowledge, which comes from their families and homes and the communities. 1

Now pause a moment to imagine the degree of omniscience that must reside with a teacher to deliver on Domzalski's idealistic view for “culturally sustaining” 25-30 or more 10 year olds in a 3rd or 4th grade inner-city classroom.

Quite obviously the capacity of a teacher to respond to the cultural and behavioral circumstance in the classroom will be reflected in the teacher's confidence or self-efficacy. As confidence declines on the part of the teacher, students will sense the decline and may begin to take behavioral liberties that may otherwise have been manageable.

Many facets of the classroom may be important considerations for teachers to manage. The physical components are obvious enough but, of course, some classroom conditions may be totally beyond the realm of what a teacher can manage. For example, window (natural) and artificial lighting across a school day, temperature and humidity, paint color, floor coverings, etc. all of which can greatly influence attitudes of students as well as teachers. As simple a thing as cleaning the classroom may be either imposed on the teacher, or completely outside the teacher's sphere of influence as it is done “after school” by a janitorial staff that s/he never sees. School authorities may select the furniture and even insist on particular arrangements of the furniture not to mention appropriate and inappropriate uses of desks, tables, chairs, maps, projectors and on and on. Teachers may be only expected to manage avoiding any damage from kids being kids and to justify this as “learning” respect for property of others. When a kid carves initials on “my desk” there will be thunder to pay—called management intervention.

The academic or intellectual domain is ostensibly managed by the teacher. But, again, there are uncontrollable outside influences to which a teacher may be duty bound to respond. The curriculum adopted by the district or state is certainly one such influence. Quite simply there may be outside conditions imposed on time spent on particular subjects. Too much time on one element of the curriculum—kids are engaged and having fun—may have to be compensated by restriction of another element's time. Small deviation may be teacher controlled but being off schedule by an hour could cause disciplinary action, particularly or especially when the deviation from expectation is recurring.

Emotional events occur throughout a typical school day. Many of these are outside of teacher control but must be responded to (managed) nevertheless with empathy, sympathy or restriction. Consider the classroom where students with a broad range of disabilities may be assigned, supposedly at random, and create a new set of situations that must be managed by the classroom teacher. Fortunately, there are certain funding sources so that there may be assistants in the form of paraprofessionals to support both the disabled student and the classroom teacher. These resources are controlled top-down and outside the perview of the classroom teacher-manager. So-called learning disabilities are denoted for additional staffing inside and outside the classroom. Assignments within the classroom typical fall within the range or limits of authority of the teacher for management of the paraprofessionals involved. It likely goes without saying that this may be dicey or delicate when top0down rules are ambiguous.

Humiliation has too often been a tool used by teachers for classroom management. Parents and religious leaders have also made liberal use of humiliation to control behavior. Stress levels can elevate across an entire class if one peer is subjected to retribution by a teacher. There is also a regrettable history of using capital punishments for classroom management. Fear on the part of both teacher and students runs rampant across too much of education's history. This may be reflected on teachers without regard for gender differences. And, invocation of religious imagery as in “Jesus is watching you” may work in some situations but would and should run afoul of keeping religion outside of the classroom.

A teacher is subordinate to many considerations that are not pedagogical but are managerial. Classrooms are only manageable for a very limited number of objectives and only rarely for broad goals and vision. Accordingly it is unlikely that a teacher can be viewed either internally by students (and conceivably by their parents in some limited way) or externally as a leader. General Russell Honore recognized; leadership as working with goals and vision; management is working with objectives. When the educational environment is that of a school situation where authority is top-down, objectives can dominate management at all levels. At the top level, an education board and superintendent of schools will be drawn toward objectives that lead to effective management. Although a vision and mission statement my serve up lofty language of learning aimed at good public relations, which are necessary for both board members and their appointed Executive Officer, objectives become the essential management tool and leadership is lost to execution. The executive officer is provided not only a lofty salary but a bureaucracy to support the mission. Little wonder that tangible results are demanded. Those demands are passed down the chain of command. Control is the order of the day. Quality and teaching are often used in the same sentence to emphasize where the buck stops. It is not in the executive suite.

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Uploaded 29 March 2020