Is Classroom Management A Skill?

A new study from three actual academics and one TNTP analytics director who's also at Annenberg Institute, looks at what sort of factors influence the early career development for teachers. It's behind a paywall (because academics are sad that teachers in the field don't pay more attention to academic research, but not sad enough to come up with a way to make that research accessible, but that's okay, I'm not bitter or anything), but Sarah Sparks took a look at it for EdWeek.

The study looked at 25,000 novice teachers in Tennessee (which makes me wonder about the definition of "novice," because Tennessee has around 70,000 K-12 teachers total).

Sparks tells us that the study finds that the major factor that predicts "a new teacher’s effectiveness and likelihood to stay in the classroom is how quickly they learn to manage class, including student behavior." They based this conclusion on principal observation and the less-than-useful VAM scores.

What I found interesting about the discussion is the notion that classroom management is a "skill" that is part of "foundational teaching skills." Can you learn all about it in a classroom management class?

I'll argue that classroom management skills, like many reading skills and critical thinking skills, is a how and not a what. To work on critical thinking skills, you have to think about something. And to work on classroom management, you have to be managing classroom teaching.

Consider, for example, a teacher who declares that the students in the class must be quiet and orderly before she will start teaching anything. The result is a class period in which nothing happens for the first several minutes. Worse, she ends up in this fruitless dialog:

Teacher: Be quiet. Stop talking. Sit still, and focus your attention on me.

Student: Why? You aren't doing anything except yelling at us.

The teacher in this scenario doesn't really have anywhere to go next except "Because I said so, and your will must be subordinate to mine." Lord knows there are plenty of teachers who take this approach; they are the same ones that talk about needing to break students' spirits so that the teacher can do her job. It assumes that the classroom can't really function--can't become an actual classroom--until students are managed. This is not classroom management, but school-based authoritarianism, student management and subjugation.

Setting aside for the moment any moral or ethical objections to this approach, it just doesn't work very well. It takes a huge amount of energy and effort before you even start the actual teaching. The students that you do bend to your will then become floppy learners who have to be led everywhere, and those that you do not bend to your will become opponents.

None of which is meant to suggest that the teachers should simply take her hands off the wheels and let students to do whatever. A functional classroom needs an adult who is in charge,

The most basic rule of classroom management is that if you want to demand your students' attention, you must requisition it for some purpose. "Pay attention" requires a target, a thing you want them to pay attention to.

Also, engagement is not education, but it helps make education possible. Engagement is not a sign of learning, but it is a sign that the classroom management piece is working. Still, it has to be connected to the teaching part to be any use.

There are several elements here, and it's these elements that can help the newbie.

Know your stuff. Classroom management comes more easily when the teacher clearly knows what she's talking about. That doesn't mean acting like the Unquestionable God Of All Knowledge (which actually projects the opposite), but it does mean being the expert on the content. It also means moving through the lesson like you have a clear purpose and direction.

Embrace your authority. Starting out, it feels uncomfortable top inhabit the role of the Adult In Charge. But that's part of the gig. Even if your goal is a more democratic, egalitarian classroom, you still have to embrace the role of the grownup. You may want to share authority over the class direction and choices, but you cannot share what you do not possess.

Empathy and consequences. There is an ongoing debate about understanding acting out as communication or as misbehavior that needs to be addressed. It is a dumb argument. Of course acting out is communication, but that does not mean it doesn't have to have consequences. Empathy is important and necessary; so is protecting the safety and learning of all the other students in the classroom.

Don't stop teaching. This is a hard trick to master, like both watching the road and checking your mirrors the first time you drive. But if you stop class to deal with management issues, you will never be done dealing with management issues. "We're not going to continue until you get quiet" just invites students to say "You've got a deal!"

Some critical elements are beyond the newbie's control. If the front office is useless as back-up for the classroom teacher, all the classroom management "skills" in the world won't help here. The building administration should be providing support and assistance (and "Have you tried building a relationship with the student" and "We won't do anything until you've called the parents five times" are neither help nor assistance). New teachers should be actively mentored, and not simply abandoned to figure things out.

There will be students who are especially resistant to being managed. Think of it this way--every terrible adult in the world was once a student in someone's classroom. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of difficult students has increased post-pandemic.

Add to that an atmosphere of increased hostility to public education, fed by the Trump administration, and you have a stew of factors that a new teacher cannot be expecte3d to navigate without some seasoned mentoring and administrative support.

Could college programs do more? Perhaps, but classroom management cannot be taught or learned in a vacuum any more than making inferences can be taught separate from reading. And like reading skills, classroom management skills will be developed in a very specific context (in this case, the particular students and content). That means that a new teacher doesn't really start to grasp classroom management until she is in a classroom trying to teach. I had many, many student teachers over the years, and only one was a natural--all the rest had to learn as they went. Expecting a newbie to command a class is unrealistic, but preparing them to be experts in their content, to know about dealing with students of that age, and to be mentored and supported as they get started will be far more useful than making them take study classroom management skills.