"Sit Still and Face Forward": How the Myth of Teacher Control Undermines Classroom Management
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, "Sit Still and Face Forward": How the Myth of Teacher Control Undermines Classroom Management - Living in Dialogue:
