By Eliot Graham.

My second classroom teaching job was in a charter school serving low-income Black middle-schoolers in an urban neighborhood. This school, like many “no-excuses” schools, put a heavy emphasis on discipline and classroom management. I once saw a student sent out of the room for how she looked at a teacher. Another teacher, a former charter school “teacher of the year,” taught by passing out large, photocopied packets, but was held up as a model for others because her classroom was quiet and orderly.

I had read Doug Lemov’s (2010), Teach Like a Champion, and I bought into the idea that an ideal classroom would involve absolute silence and order. However, my students did not want to be silent, or sometime even orderly. Attempting to meet the expectation that classes enter the room and sit down in total silence, I had them “practice” again and again, sending them back into the hall and having them re-enter the room. I took “points” away from the more obvious talkers, I called parents, and I sent kids to the office. As I continually failed to meet the expectations of the school, the principal started to call me to her office for talks about my failure. Each day, I struggled with the students. Each evening, I dreaded the sound of my classroom phone ringing, summoning me to the office for another dressing-down.

My experience was extreme, but it illustrates one of the fundamental problems in how we think about classroom management. Because teachers are responsible for the behavior in their classrooms, we fall into the trap of believing that they (we) can control the behavior in their (our) classrooms. The reality is that no human being can control the behavior of any other human being. We can attempt to influence it, certainly. Offers of rewards or threat of punishment might influence people’s choices, as do respect, trust, and good relationships. But even young children are still able to make choices about their behavior. Especially as they enter adolescence, young people “have something of their own to say about the formation of their intellectual and social attributes; they have the power to act in what they believe are their own interests, and they do,” (Gillen, 2014, p. 56). If the teacher wants a student to sit down, and s/he insists upon standing, nothing short of physical force can actually make the student sit down.

While this is true in all classrooms, it may be an especially significant issue in schools that, like the one I taught in, primarily serve low-income youth of color. These young people are significantly less likely to trust and acquiesce to the purposes of the teacher simply because s/he is a teacher (Delpit, 1995; Weiner, 2006). Simultaneously, urban schools, teachers and students are increasingly subject to technologies of control (Advancement Project, 2010), and the “successful” urban teacher is often constructed first and foremost as one whose classroom is “under control.”

In making this argument, I am not attempting to relieve teachers of responsibility for the students in their classrooms. However, I think the mistaken belief that good teachers—“effective” classroom managers—can control students is deeply problematic for two reasons. First, this belief makes it easy for teachers, especially new teachers, to feel that they have failed if they cannot make a student do what they think the student should be doing. Gillen (2014) asserts that one of the greatest obstacles to forming real relationships between teacher and students is “the teacher’s shame at not being able to ‘control’ the class,” (p. 116). This shame may turn to anger at teacher education programs for failing to prepare them, at school administrators or disciplinarians for failing to support them, or at the students themselves. It may turn to self-doubt or depression, ending in teachers leaving the classroom. It certainly exacerbates the already significant alienation between low-income, urban students of color, and their oftentimes White, suburban, middle-class teachers. What it does not cultivate is patience and understanding for students and for oneself—qualities that are needed to create a calm, caring, and supportive classroom environment (Weissbourd, 2003).

Second, this belief robs students of their agency as human beings. Popular discourses around classroom management increasingly rely upon mechanistic explanations of student behavior, and imply that teachers can draw upon a bag of tricks and easy moves to get students back in line. Supposedly, a successful teacher will always be able to take some immediate, simple action that produces the right response in the student. Gillen (2014) describes a mandatory professional development session in which teachers were instructed “only to consider what takes place ‘three minutes to three seconds before and three seconds to three minutes after’ the behavior that is scheduled to be ‘extinguished’ occurs,” (p. 51). Jones (2000) offers a system of classroom management in which teachers move through a prescribed series of steps in response to off-task student behavior. While strategies and techniques are certainly useful in classroom management, reducing classroom management to strategies and techniques effectively reduces students to widgets. It neglects their individual personalities, the circumstances of their lives, their developmental need to test boundaries, their mood that particular day, their reasons for “acting out.” It reduces them to less than human. Such a view is totally counter to the need for teachers to consider, get to know, and try to understand their students as individuals—to build the sort of relationship that enables effective management in the first place.

Jones (2000) claims that if a teacher’s classroom management is “working,” inappropriate behavior will be largely extinguished in the first six to eight weeks of school. However, recognizing students as full human beings with agency requires accepting the inevitability of mistakes, disruptions, and challenges. Again, this is true is all schools, but especially true in schools serving large numbers of children who live in poverty, and consequently face significant stressors in their outside lives. I am now a researcher studying classroom management in low-income schools, and the reasons I’ve observed for students acting inappropriately in the classroom include:

• a student’s belief that he is “dumb” and cannot succeed
• a student’s desire to distract classmates from his sexual orientation by acting “bad”
• spacing out and failing to hear the directions
• adolescent curiosity about the risk of defying adult authority
• intense desire to tell a friend something important
• emotional pain resulting from the loss of a family member
• boredom

There are no tricks and techniques that can possibly be effective, much less caring, in dealing with all of these challenges. Suggesting that there could be, or that such issues do not arise in well-run classrooms, fundamentally disrupts relationships between teachers and students by oversimplifying the challenging nature of the teacher’s role.

I believe that instead of expecting teachers to “control” the classroom, we should understand teachers as leading the classroom. Leaders persuade others—full human beings in their own right—to follow them. Rather than assuming authority comes automatically with their position, authority is understood to be “earned by personal efforts and exhibited by personal characteristics,” (Delpit, 1995, p. 35). Goodman (2010) clarifies the difference between power and authority, explaining authority as power plus legitimacy. Teachers are awarded power by virtue of their position; in particular, they can award grades and mete out punishments. However, only the students themselves, in their recognition of the teacher’s right to lead them, can confer legitimacy. Teachers earn this legitimacy through what Weiner (2006) describes as “‘moral’ authority, which rests on the perception of students and parents that the teacher is knowledgeable about the subject matter, competent in pedagogy, and committed to helping all students succeed, in school and life,” (p. 92). In the absence of legitimacy, and attention to what is required to earn it, no amount of power will be sufficient to achieve “control.” Indeed, though students expect teachers to be able to enforce standards of behavior that create orderly and safe classrooms (Delpit, 1995), an excessive reliance on exercising power in order to control the classroom undermines the student-teacher relationships required for legitimacy.

Classroom management is a profoundly difficult and important task. It includes not only creating an environment in which learning can occur, but also insisting that students speak and act ethically, dealing with students’ individual problems, and fostering students’ academic, civic, and social-emotional growth (Evertson & Weinstein, 2011). It includes not only effecting, but also being effected by students (Gillen, 2014).

Though it has been almost five years, I often think of the students from the charter school where I worked. Though the principal told me that my failure was in my inability to enforce silence, I now believe it was in allowing unreasonable expectations to make the children into my enemies. I am a caring person, but in my belief that I had to control them, I failed to care about them in the ways that mattered. Only in recognizing students as full agents, and thus re-conceptualizing teachers’ roles as managers of the classroom, can we truly prepare teachers for the challenge of leading young people.

References:

Advancement Project. (2010.) Test, punish, and push-out: How “zero-tolerance” and high stakes testing funnel youth into the school-to-prison pipeline.

Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflicts in the classroom. New York, N.Y.: New Press.

Evertson, C. M., & Weinstein, C. S. (2011). Classroom management as a field of inquiry. In C. M. Evertson & C. S. Weinstein (Eds.), Handbook of classroom management: Research, practice, and contemporary issues (pp. 3 – 15). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Gillen, J. (2014). Educating for Insurgency: The roles of young people in schools of poverty. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Goodman, J. F. (2010). Student authority: Antidote to alienation. Theory and Research in Education, 8(3), 227-247.

Jones, F. (2000). Tools for teaching (1^st ed.). Santa Cruz, CA: Frederic H. Jones & Associates, Inc.

Lemov, D. (2010). Teach like a champion: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Weiner, L. (2006). Urban teaching: The essentials (Revised ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Weissbourd, R. (2003). Moral teachers, moral students. Educational Leadership, 60(6), 6 – 11.