What’s the Real Purpose of Classroom Management?
Everyone knows why classroom management skills are considered a critical part of teacher training. The reason we need to minimize “misbehavior” and get students to show up, sit down, and pay attention is so we can teach them stuff. That proposition is so obvious that it’s rarely defended or even spelled out, except maybe on the first day of Classroom Management 101. While we may disagree about strategies — for example, the relative merits of discipline versus self-discipline (getting kids to regulate and manage themselves) — we take it for granted that the whole point is to create an environment conducive to learning.
But what if that wasn’t entirely true? What if, at least for some teachers and administrators, an orderly classroom was the ultimate goal? And what if the curriculum and the model of teaching were actually chosen with that goal in mind?
I first encountered this unsettling possibility some years ago in a book called Contradictions of Control. Its author, Rice University professor Linda McNeil, had spent a lot of time observing in classrooms and thinking about what she saw. Rather than treating discipline as “instrumental to mastering the [academic] content,” she concluded, “many teachers reverse those ends and means. They maintain discipline by the ways they present course content.”[1]
Once I let that idea sink in, I had to admit that a traditional curriculum (lists of facts to be memorized and skills to be practiced) and a traditional approach to pedagogy (lectures, textbooks, worksheets) make it much easier for a teacher to maintain control over students. Just compare that sort of classroom to one in which kids are encouraged to construct meaning and understand ideas from the inside out — an approach that’s collaborative, open-ended, project-based, and driven by students’ interests. If the first model suggests a rehearsed solo performance by the instructor, the second offers instruments to everyone in the room and invites them to participate in a kind of jazz improvisation.
If your goal were order and conformity, which would you choose?
What’s true about course content and teaching method is also true about assessment. Grades are not particularly reliable or valid indicators of intellectual proficiency, and CONTINUE READING: What's the Real Purpose of Classroom Management? - Alfie Kohn
