Classroom Management

"Classroom management refers to the wide variety of skills and techniques that teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class. When classroom-management strategies are executed effectively, teachers minimize the behaviors that impede learning for both individual students and groups of students, while maximizing the behaviors that facilitate or enhance learning. Generally speaking, effective teachers tend to display strong classroom-management skills, while the hallmark of the inexperienced or less effective teacher is a disorderly classroom filled with students who are not working or paying attention.

While a limited or more traditional interpretation of effective classroom management may focus largely on “compliance”—rules and strategies that teachers may use to make sure students are sitting in their seats, following directions, listening attentively, etc.—a more encompassing or updated view of classroom management extends to everything that teachers may do to facilitate or improve student learning, which would include such factors as behavior (a positive attitude, happy facial expressions, encouraging statements, the respectful and fair treatment of students, etc.), environment (for example, a welcoming, well-lit classroom filled with intellectually stimulating learning materials that’s organized to support specific learning activities), expectations (the quality of work that teachers expect students to produce, the ways that teachers expect students to behave toward other students, the agreements that teachers make with students), materials (the types of texts, equipment, and other learning resources that teachers use), or activities (the kinds of learning experiences that teachers design to engage student interests, passions, and intellectual curiosity). Given that poorly designed lessons, uninteresting learning materials, or unclear expectations, for example, could contribute to greater student disinterest, increased behavioral problems, or unruly and disorganized classes, classroom management cannot be easily separated from all the other decisions that teachers make. In this more encompassing view of classroom management, good teaching and good classroom management become, to some degree, indistinguishable."