I am a historian, I have spent years (decades) studying and writing about American education. I know my limitations. Aside from teaching graduate students in courses about the history of education and controversies in current education policy, I have not been a classroom teacher. That may be why I respect classroom teachers so much. I can’t do what they do. I would not know how to control students who are bored and don’t want to be there. I would not be able to teach a classroom of 35 adolescents who wish they were somewhere else. I would not know how to teach 24 feisty five-year-olds. I would not have the patience to spend all day with little children. I am awed when I meet the men and women who do it every day.
The upshot is that I never tell others how to teach. How could I? I haven’t done it. I can’t do it. I have no authority to tell others how to do what I can’t do.
I do know a lot about the history of education, the politics of education, the federal role in education, the politics of testing and textbooks and curriculum. Aside from my studies, I worked in the federal Department of Education for two years, and served on the federal testing board for seven years. And I have learned a lot by writing books. But I have no authority to opine about how to teach.
Thus, when I read the following comment, written in response to my post this morning about the Match graduate school of education, I thought this would be a good place to start a discussion about how to teach. I’d like to hear from teachers. What do you think?
| I am so glad that you brought up this \”emergency teacher prep\” program. I recently applied there (to the \”Match Teacher Corps\”, a one-year teaching prep program) and was pretty appalled.I just graduated from a very prestigious school and in my senior year began applying to different teaching programs. Since my school focused on liberal arts and less on practical applications, I was unable to take any education coursework or even minor in education. However, I knew all along that I wanted to go into teaching. My career center kept recommending to me MATCH-like programs — TFA was recommended to me many times, as well as MATCH, and the Academy for Urban School Leadership in Chicago (responsible for many of those lovely turnarounds!). Many of my peers were attracted to these options.You asked in a previous post, how are our nation\’s brightest and best being attracted to these ridiculous programs? Well, I am one of that population, and I will explain: academia buys into the idealism of these programs, and the notion that they can prepare teachers \”faster\” than regular programs. Many of my peers are on the fast-track to a career, especially when bogged down with student loans, and to many of us who have no background in education, it seems much more logical to become certified in three months rather than three years. If we get our salary faster, we can get on our feet faster, and start leading a stable life. Not to mention that TFA looks great on a resume, and who would want to teach in public schools, anyways?Well, apart from all this, I applied to MTC (Match Teacher Corps) and got asked for a phone interview. They provided me with the first chapter of one of their curricular texts. The chapter starts out with a quote from Gary Rubinstein (ironic, right?): \”Too many teachers struggle through their first year, expending vast quantities of energy trying to maintain classroom discipline–at the expense of teaching.\”
This text is extremely unprofessional and belittles the notion of teaching as a profession. Examples: In this book, we describe the beliefs, presence, and moves you\’ll need. At the end of the book, we\’ll outline how we\’re going to help you buy into the beliefs, develop your presence, and master the moves. The 6 Beliefs are: The 3 Rules of Authoritative Presence govern: The 7 Proactive Moves are: The 9 Reactive Moves are: –It then goes on to say– Belief 1: I am the ultimate authority in the classroom. Belief 2: My goal in classroom management must be 100%. Belief 3: My Patrolling Effort and Behavior Oblongata needs to be –Etc., etc. It then goes on to have a picture of Chuck Norris, with the caption \”Is this Chuck Norris? Or a mirror?\” And a picture of a shaky house with the caption \”This house used to be on 100% solid ground. Then it was 90% solid ground. Then 80%. Then…not.\” I could go on, but I won\’t. There is enough to analyze here, alone. How damaging could it be to adopt and truly believe Belief 6? And what is it with this emphasis on 100%–how quickly a teacher will burn out if they truly believe they are obligated to reach every student! Do students here sound like they are respected as individuals, or are they treated as cogs in the machine of education? It seems to me that the teachers themselves are treated like cogs, and if the students do not succeed it is the fault of the teacher. What kind of profession does this text reflect? A respectful career choice, or a stint as a bartender? This reads more like an instruction manual giving tips on how to catch a girl. I was offended in reading it and was glad that another job opportunity opened up before I had to make a decision about MATCH. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Who would want to attend and be trained/”educated” by the lunacy describe above?
Other than a charter school zombie, that is.
As a high school classroom teacher with over fifteen years experience, this type of graduate preparation is ludicrous! There is nothing more important, especially in the HS classroom, than a teacher who is an expert in his/her respective field. The “tricks of the trade” are second nature for those truly called to this noble profession. A teacher needs passion and patience, but more than anything else she needs to know what she’s talking about. That is what gives the teacher authority. Students can smell fear and detect a teacher without content confidence. This is where behavioral problems emerge. The students feel insulted, and rightfully so; they deserve our best.
Diane, the relationships we build with students make all the difference in student learning. Understanding student needs, interests, and abilities gives us the keys for learning with each individual student. I believe we always treat students with respect and understanding. Each student is unique and has limitless possibilities. Positive, encouraging pedagogy is essential. The outstanding teachers I know all possess this ability to teach, encourage, and inspire. What kind of teacher do you want your children and grandchildren to have?
i read a lot of FB and blog posts about education, and thought i was beyond being shocked.
i was wrong.
the quotes above are some of the most offensive, backwards and regressive things about how to teach i’ve ever seen. it is incomprehensible that any “text” would advocate these ideas, and terrifying that a “graduate school” curriculum would endorse them.
i have strong feelings about TFA, alternative routes to certification, and other “quick tracks” in to teaching–but i have never blamed the young persons who look at these options as reasonable. its the allegedly more experienced, mature and wise people who create and develop these programs that deserve our attention, and our investigation.
“How damaging could it be to adopt and truly believe Belief 6? And what is it with this emphasis on 100%–how quickly a teacher will burn out if they truly believe they are obligated to reach every student!”
That right there will be the rallying cry. These sorts of conversations break down the moment someone admits that they don’t believe it’s their job to teach every student.
As a teacher of 23 years, I find this is absolutely an appalling disregard for the professionalism of the profession of education. It is also a very scary notion for teacher preparation. These authoritative, autocratic beliefs are not what makes for good teaching and classroom management. Teaching in the manner described above will elicit fear in students, not learning. When individuals (including kids) experience fear, the “flight or fight” mechanisms kick in. With either case (flight or flight), the students have shut down and motivation is nowhere to be found.
Subscribing to the beliefs described above seems to be creating something that maybe the politicians are searching for–throwaway teachers–teach for a year or two and then toss them out with yesterday’s garbage. And, then they can sit back and say, “Yep, we were right when we said the teachers are ineffective and we need to control their every move, etc, etc.
I recently visited Teaching Works at the University of Michigan. A practitioner/scholar there told me that they strive to remain agnostic about teaching methods–that if it works, it doesn’t matter if it came from Match or from Teacher’s College.
There’s nuance for you. While I enjoy reading this blog, I’m often frustrated by its penchant for painting with a binary palette.
The great thing about living in a free country is that you have choices including the choice not to read this blog
one of the things i think its silly to be agnostic about is how to teach. i don’t what Teaching Works is all about, but pretending that how we teach doesn’t matter seems naive and silly.
and to infer that Match and Teachers College are somehow equivalent is similarly naive–its the same kind of false equivalency we see bandied about in the political arena that leas to folks believing that both parties are equally “bad,” and leads otherwise well-intentioned teachers to believe that all teaching methods are equally “good,” so long as they “work.”
the problem is how we define “works”–for Match, its all about test scores. at TC, and other good schools and colleges of education, its about creating vibrant learning communities, empowering students and teachers to construct their own knowledge, and help learners develop all of their abilities and interests, in all subject areas and disciplines, including the arts & humanities–not just STEM.
maybe you should visit other schools and teacher preparation programs, too.
A simple google search might aid you here. I think we can all agree that the University of Michigan is a prestigious university.
And to be clear, the agnosticism here is about the source of a teaching practice. I won’t rule out employing a method simply because I have an ideological disagreement with the source. Teaching is not a zero-sum game. Match might advocate for ten practices that I find distasteful and ineffective. But if they give me one that I find valuable in my practice, I’ll use it.
So many counter arguments here are based a willful misreading of a dissenting opinion. “Pretending that how we teach doesn’t matter is naive and silly” was not at all in the spirit of my post.
If one were designing a crash training course for recent college grads heading for teaching jobs in low-SES inner-city schools, it’s reasonable that the highest priority would be classroom management techniques.
I’m a retired attorney, not a teacher. But family members and friends who have extensive experience teaching, particularly in low-SES/inner-city areas, consistently cite student behavior (chronic absenteeism, chronic tardiness, and minor but endemic classroom misconduct) as the major school-based obstacle to effective teaching. Experienced teachers writing in ed blogs and in first-person “my-life-as-a-teacher” books frequently make this same point.
The student behavior problems are not confined to low-SES areas, but are much more severe in low-SES areas. Teacher friends who teach in the suburbs rarely cite student behavior as a major problem (rather, they cite helicopter-parent behavior as a major problem). Given that the current national obsession with declining school quality is largely the result of low-SES/inner-city schools (that is, if all US schools had suburban schools’ test scores/graduation rates, school quality would be at most a minor issue), perhaps we could most productively address the school quality issue by focusing on student behavior in low-SES/inner-city schools. In other words, the main difference between what’s happening each day in suburban schools and what’s happening each day in inner-city schools is that students in suburban schools are usually behaving appropriately and students in inner-city schools are often not behaving appropriately.
Many teachers have told me that they received little or no training regarding classroom management in their ed school classes or even in their student teaching. For teachers headed to suburban schoools, classroom management may not be a signficiant concern — most suburban students come from homes that condition children to behave reasonably in school + most suburban parents will support school conduct/discipline codes + peer pressure will usually deter rather than encourage disruptive behavior in school. The opposite is true for low-SES/inner-city students. Therefore, classroom management skills are a useful extra for a suburban teacher but an absolute necessity for a low-SES/inner-city teacher.
It’s amazing — to me at least — that, although low-SES/inner-city teachers consistently cite student behavior as the major obstacle to effective teaching, school reformers (corporate or otherwise) rarely, if ever, even mention student behavior. Of course, school reform focused on improving student behavior (unlike school reform focused on vouchers, charters, high-stakes-testing, or discharge of senior teachers) will not benefit outside interests financially or reduce school salaries, but one would hope that disinterested school reformers — such as yourself — would be sympathetic to classroom management reform as a potential magic bullet to improve the inner-city schools.
I understand the importance of classroom management. So does every teacher. The question though is whether a militaristic approach is appropriate or necessary, and whether children who are poor and minority “need” an approach that is militaristic. I don’t know the answer. I worry about having one kind of school for poor black kids and another kind of school for white suburban kids. Should schools for the former be boot camps and schools for the latter be rich with the arts and inspiration? That’s why I am interested in the responses of experienced teachers.
I’m not advocating a particular approach to classroom management — like you, I have minimal experience teaching school-age children and zero experience teaching inner-city children.
Similarly, I’m not necessarily advocating different approaches to classroom management for inner-city and suburban schools.
My main point is that, based on numerous info sources, it’s clear that classroom management is often/usually ineffective in low-SES/inner-city schools and often/usually effective in suburban schools. My secondary point is that no one’s paying much attention to classroom management — teacher training programs rarely emphasize classroom management and the school reform discussion totally ignores student behavior/classroom management.
If I were an education czar, I’d survey experienced inner-city teachers/administrators regarding how to improve student behavior/classroom management in inner-city schools, identify the most promising ideas, and test these ideas in pilot projects. And, I’d give this a much higher priority than high-stakes-testing, charters, or vouchers as the way to improve inner-city schools.
It’s possible that low-SES/inner-city schools simply require more attention to classroom management than suburban schools. Or, low-SES/inner-city schools might require different classroom management techniques than suburban schools. Or — most likely — both of the above. Presumably, students with learning disabilities require different instructional techniques than normal students; by analogy students from low-SES/inner-city families will often have behaving disabilities that similarly require different classroom management techniques.
In my non-expert opinion, several relatively inexpensive and non-controversial classroom management reforms would include: 1) have teachers explicitly/repeatedly announce behavior rules and consistently impose time-out penalties for violations with no badgering/negotiating/anger (like the TV Supernanny model); 2) prohibit administrators from reprimanding teachers for sending insubordinate students to the “main office”; 3) provide sufficient main office resources so that teachers can impose traditional discipline (sending students to the office, lunch detention, after-school detention, even in-school suspension) without incurring significant personal administrative burdens that, in practice, deter teachers from imposing discipline and encourage teachers to condone misbehavior; and 4) create a strong presumption that the teacher will be credited over the student in he-said/she-said disputes and that minor teacher-imposed discipline is appropriate (in other words, discourage students/parents from challenging minor teacher-imposed discipline).
Labor Lawyer’s point jibes with my experience and the response I wrote below. There can be a place for a little toughness in teaching just as there is in loving parenting. I think understanding community building in the classroom should coexist with a core respect for the authority of the teacher. Balance is all in education.
classroom management is about more than discipline and a quiet classroom. its about getting to the root causes of student behavior problems, and trying not to let distractions get in the way of learning.
teachers know a lot about classroom management–its non-teachers who think it should Job #1 in the classroom, as though its something that we can 1. target, and 2. fix.
classroom management is something that teachers deal with every day, and will deal with for every day they continue to teach. the issues don’t ever go away, and a military classroom won’t “solve” the problem. if it did, there would be no need for military police or JAG courts, right?
Tips for a new teacher:
Above all else RESPECT your students, if you respect them for who they are they will respect you.
1. Be knowledgeable about your subject matter. If you don’t know something a student asks say “I don’t know, let’s figure it out”.
2. Listen and learn from your students, they are your best teachers.
3. Expect the unexpected.
4. Go with the flow of the moment in the class.
5. Resist administrative mandates that you know will harm your students.
6. Fly under the administrative radar if possible while speaking your mind for what is best for your class and students
6. Engage parents as needed.
7. Jump in with both feet and enjoy what you do in the class.
8. Seek out experienced teachers, listen to them,and ask them about anything, they will gladly help as they were in your shoes before.
9. Do not expect to “like” all your students but treat all equally and fairly.
10. Thank students for pointing out when you make an error/misstatement.
I must add a #11. Know that it’s OK to laugh-at yourself, with (not at) your students. Don’t try to manufacture these moments-students can tell and you’ll lose any chance to connect with them-but treasure them when they happen.
One of my most favorite moments was when Student A made a completely random, time-wasting statement, I made my standard response to such statements, and Student B provided his own variation on my response, but, man, kid NAILED it! I almost cried from laughing so hard, and 3 years later, it still makes me smile.
And personally, I find that being a bada** is FAR more effective if I save it for “special” occasions.
I like your #11!!
Diane, having now left the classroom after 17 years, at least for the present, I’m not sre how much validity my words still carry But let me offer a few
1. The teacher is NEVER the ultimate authority in the classroom. S/he is responsibility to the building administrators, the parents, and ultimately to the students. Attempting to act is if one is the ultimate authority is a path to unnecessary conflict and failure.
2. That said, the teacher has a great deal of responsibility, which includes knowing one’s students as well as one’s curricular material. Knowing the latter, even at an expert level, is insufficient. That does not mean one can successfully engage one’s students to get them to wrestle with the material beyond meaningless rote memorization to spit things back on multiple choice tests.
3. Parker Palmer argues that teaching is a series of simultaneous, overlapping relationships, for example: teacher-students, students to each other, everyone with the curricular material.
4. The best classroom discipline flows from lessons that engage the students – to engage them does not mean to entertain them, although sometimes an ability to do so can help. To engage the students one first has to know at what level they are, and then challenge them somewhat out of their comfort zones but not so far out that they shut down. Yes, that is a constructivist approach, but after 17 years of teaching different kids of kids, I am firm believer that it is necessary.
5. Real learning occurs not in the false imagery from Waiting for Superman of a teacher peeling back kids’ scalps and pouring in knowledge, what the great educator Paolo Freire rightly derided as the banking model of education. It occurs when students take ownership of their own learning, albeit with adults providing scaffolding to help them learn how to take ownership.
6. If you asked me what I taught, the answer would always be my students. Yes I was primarily a teacher of social studies as a curriculum (although I have also taught study skills and language arts, and to some degree music as the musical director of musical theater) – I might be helping them learn critical thinking, working on making an argument, working on their presentation skills – written and oral . Teaching them to learn how to listen to another person, how to work in groups, different skills to broaden their toolkit and thus empower them to choose among different alternatives.
My measure of my success is not the scores on external tests, although by that standard I have always done pretty well. It is the students who thank me, or their parents. It is those who want to stay in touch – I will not FRIEND a current student on Facebook. Each year I am amazed when at the end of the school year dozens of students send me FRIEND requests. It is the students who stay in touch, or who reach out years later, as a former valedictorian did to me as she was graduating from college, and when she found out I was retiring came home a day early to attend the informal gathering my department had put together to honor me.
Most of all it is the now several dozen students who themselves have gone into K-12 teaching, in many cases specifically because of having been my students. When the school system announced my teaching award from the Washington Post (Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher) a number of them sent me emails not just congratulating me but thanking me.
Or it was two of my students who when I was competing for a paid trip to a conference that was important to me at a time when I could not afford it organized without my knowledge a Facebook Group to help me – and their help was what put me over the top.
I put this down not to brag, but to illustrate that teaching involves connecting at a level beyond the intellectual, especially in the K-12 setting. For my students to learn all they can, they have to trust when I ask them to take risks – including the risk of being publicly wrong. If I want them to give me that trust, I have to offer it to them. I have to be willing to let them go off on what may seem a rabbit trail, because that is how their minds work and it is what they need to do to make sense of the material with which they are wrestling.
I look at these hurryup programs to get people in the classroom, and here are my questions
– when does the future teacher learn anything meaningful about human growth and development
– does the future teacher get adequate preparation in working with students across the spectrum? There are legal requirements for students with IEPs and 504 plans, and there are challenges for dealing with the gifted, and then there are students who are both special ed (perhaps ADD) and talented and gifted?
– has the student had the opportunity to observe classrooms that are physically organize differently, teachers with different approaches, in order to understand that there is in each case more than one way, and s/he needs to figure out what works for that individual teacher in that setting
– most important, has the future teacher gone through the start of a school year with an experienced teacher? Even as an observer? To see all the paperwork that needs to be addressed, to see how to set up classroom procedures and classroom management (I prefer that to saying rules or discipline because while one may have the authority to impose school rules, is works far better when the students buy in).
Just a few thoughts that popped into my mind reading this post.
Peace.
As a teacher educator, I find it a challenge to communicate some of the nuances teacherken has expressed to my soon-to-be-teachers. The enormous responsibility of being a teacher, the importance of understanding and engaging one’s students in “managing” them, and the multiple levels that teachers can use to transform their students over the school year are ideas that I struggle to prepare my students to understand more deeply when they begin teaching.
Diane, I’m an inner city teacher with 14 years of experience.
The guiding principle I see for teachers’ practice is to create a teaching style that plays to one’s own strengths as a person and a member of the educational community. I believe that a great diversity in approaches creates a healthy learning experience for all.
But this also means that there is a place for the driven disciplinarian.
Despite the poorly thought out tone of the excerpt you shared, there is a need for something of an assertive no-nonsense approach to teaching, especially in the most challenging environments. I’m talking about environments with no functioning discipline in the hallways or in administrator’s offices. In some inner city schools, the teacher is truly on their own.
Beneath the Chuck Norris tone, I see the practice of clarity of directions and expectations, immediate and appropriate disciplinary feedback, a commitment by the teacher to infuse the classroom with drive and energy… these are all desirable.
I love my students in that special way that is unique to teachers. Part of how I bring that to my classroom is a willingness to “be the bad guy.”
But this is only an *approach* to teaching. The goal should be the same as that of a teacher who prefers to only catch flies with honey.
They may have a different approach, but the diversity of approaches can– in a well run and supportive school– all be successfully aimed at the same goal.
That teacher must temper their friendliness and fun-loving environment with a willingness to develop a tougher side to balance this. The reverse is also true.
The same applies to the curriculum. Teach your strengths, but make a conscious effort to supplement what you provide the students with areas where you’re not so strong.
This is what kills me about lockstep teaching. The very best of what the most skilled teachers have to offer will be dulled– irrevocably diminishing what it means to be an educated person in our nation.
What a sad view of teaching. Students are not products, test scores are not commodities, and teachers are not sales staff. Educational decision makers have tried to apply a business model to education and the results have been awful. If it wasn’t for teachers who remain dedicated to their profession, despite all the poorly conceived reforms, schools would no longer exist.
Diane said: “I understand the importance of classroom management. So does every teacher. The question though is whether a militaristic approach is appropriate or necessary, and whether children who are poor and minority “need” an approach that is militaristic. I don’t know the answer. I worry about having one kind of school for poor black kids and another kind of school for white suburban kids. Should schools for the former be boot camps and schools for the latter be rich with the arts and inspiration? That’s why I am interested in the responses of experienced teachers.”
It is more complicated than that.
I teach in Bridgeport CT– one of the epicenters of the failing schools/ ethnic and economic minorities/ privatization efforts. One issue in largely minority schools taught by mostly white teachers who come from out of town (as in many Connecticut urban schools) is that teachers unconsciously permit and expect worse behavior, lesser efforts and lower achievement because that is their expectation of inner city youth.
What I saw as a teacher in New York was different– most teachers went to those schools, even if they now commute in from Long Island. No matter the divide of race, the teacher tended to believe that the students could achieve, just as they did when they were in the NYC schools.
This is not so in smaller cities whose minority residents are so culturally divided from the educated teaching corps who come in to the city to teach.
My solution to this as a teacher has been to be a little bit like the teacher described in your excerpt. But strictness MUST be applied with deep respect and understanding of the students. Content mastery, enthusiasm, respect for dignity, and positivity are essential, but I do not think that teachers’ decades-long slide from a position of respect and authority in the classroom has been a good thing for our nation’s schools.
As an historian of education, you must be aware of this change– I see it as the pendulum swinging too far away from authority (which has definitely been abused by teachers in the past, and still is by some) towards — I can’t find a word for it– lassitude and helplessness.
The ideas of community in the classroom and mutual respect developed in the second half of the 20th century can also be taken too far. The answer is in the middle. Authority tempered with real respect for students. Decisiveness with a willingness to hear other opinions and change one’s mind or admit mistakes.
I must teach differently in Bridgeport than I would in Greenwich or in the Upper East Side private school where I began my career. The social complexities involved in ensuring that this is done with fairness and sensitivity are staggering.
The fact remains, though, that there are these differences. When privatization takes greater hold and experienced teachers are eliminated or chased away from inner cities, many things will be lost.
One of these things is the ability to strike a balance between A.) tailoring the educational experience to the demographics of your classroom and B.) ensuring that this educational experience is on par with schools that serve the most advantaged youths of our nation.
Some classrooms have students that need to be brought from Point M to Point Z. Some classrooms and school systems have more students that need to be brought from Point A to point Z.
Is it institutionalized racism to do this? Sometimes it can be. Sometimes it is racist to NOT do so.
I can see nothing that could prepare a teacher to find this balance but some years of trial and error, successes and mistakes. And hopefully a few “been there for 35 years” teachers to get advice from– ha, even sometimes .f it is to see how it used to be done and what can use improvement.
Homogenizing classroom management, instruction, and curriculum is akin to “trickle down education.” My concern is that cookie cutter Common Core standards and Online Instruction are nothing more than “cake” from Marie Antoinette. There are social strata in our country, and I believe it takes a human touch and some autonomy to best address these issues.
What an amazing blog and group of comments below. I am a teacher… When I read the directions manual, I have to chuckle. ” Belief 1: I am the ultimate authority in my classroom.” <— believe all they want. But, experience teaches a teacher that their classroom is a microcosm of our world, constantly evolving. To attempt to assert ultimate authority over a group of individual spirits is ludicrous, The classroom expectations are better suited when a collaboration between students, teachers, and parents is involved.
I would argue that an overly collaborative can be disastrous in a classroom where community norms have not completely prepared students to be responsible and mature in this collaboration. I hate the way that the above list was written, but do think that a healthy dose of “the buck stops here” from a teacher is a good thing. Young people need boundaries– I have learned this in practice with my quickly growing boys.
I think that it is developmentally appropriate for young people to have someone to look to as an ultimate (final) authority on something. Students in challenging schools can bring a classroom to a grinding halt if this is not the case.
My approach is to establish this, but then conduct my classroom in an open, collaborative manner– in the style of the best educational thinkers and practitioners of the ’60’s – ’90’s. But behind that should be a solid authority within the classroom– the teacher. Like it’s 1912, not 2012.
This is balance, and as it should be. We have evolved as a species to be raised in family and social unit with clear rules and social expectations.
I need a better word than “touchy-feely” to describe the more liberal management approach, because I think it has its place– but part of the ills of our 21st century society stem from a too-deep slide into relativism and permissiveness as far as our young people are concerned.
I’m a social progressive through and through, but experience (in urban schools) has shown me the importance of some aspects of the traditional role of the teacher.
But ultimately, what Kathy says below is what I most believe– that there should be a diversity of approaches– and even each individual teacher should have at their disposal a diverse set of approaches and techniques.
As I read these great comments, I found at least one common thread. That being, what might work for you, might not work for another. What, where, who and how many a teacher teaches can make a great deal of difference. The one thing that stayed constant with me was why I was there.
The point I find most offensive is the idea of the teacher having to be a “bad ass.” Yes, classroom routines, structure, rules, are all important in the classroom, and it doesn’t matter if you teach in the inner city (I do) or the suburbs, predictability is important to classroom management. Fear, military style discipline, staring down students, these DO NOT belong in classrooms. Why? Because they instill fear and inhibit trust–fear and distrust–the kiss of death for a functional classroom.
Students need confidence to speak in class, in front of their peers, they need trust to try out new ideas. Classrooms must show students that there are intellectual spaces where people can disagree without shouting, fighting, and damaging relationships. It is the teacher’s responsibility to model and teach these ways of being.
Teachers must be able to admit they are wrong, concede to a student’s point, and laugh at herself. She must model the act of being a learner, show humility, be authentic, while at the same time making this possible through keeping order in the class. This is done primarily by routines, structure, and rules all can agree on, not through being a bad ass!
A teacher must exercise authority while showing enormous respect to all students. Collaboration can occur quite successfully, even with the most difficult students, when the teacher has established structure, knows his/her students, provides engaging activities, and earns their trust. Establishing a community of learners in a classroom takes time. A teacher must be genuine. Students are quick to sense a teacher who is a fraud.
I retired after 38 years of teaching in an inner city school. I’ve watched many bright, eager, new teachers struggle (and fail) with classroom management (those with education degrees, as well as TFA teachers). I found the guidelines / suggestions / “beliefs” listed in the Match communication to be very reasonable. They were obviously simplistic, but probably designed as a review (or preview) of methods of classroom management. If you don’t believe you are the “ultimate authority” in your classroom, you probably won’t be successful in any classroom. To say that the teacher is the ultimate authority is like saying the parent is the ultimate authority. It doesn’t mean you have to BE authoritarian, it simply means you need to believe in your right to be an authority.
I’ve lived through decades of education reform movements, and am sickened by the decimation of public education. The progress of “reform” in the Hartford, CT schools parallels the ongoing “reforms” in NYC. However, I don’t object to the outline of classroom management concepts above. Discipline issues in inner city schools are a huge problem for senior teachers. New teachers need all the help they can get, including simplistic “rules”, “beliefs”, and “moves”.
Reading Diane’s original blog entry and the responding comments, one senses a disconnect within the professional educator community between 1) the professorial/suburban teacher/newbie-TFA group and 2) the veteran inner-city group. The former group, drawing on their personal experience (as teachers and students), sees school as a place where students generally behave appropriately and where teachers can deal individually with the few disruptive students. The latter group, drawing on their extensive personal experience in the inner-city schools, sees school as a place where many students routinely behave inappropriately and where, if teachers attempted to deal individually with the disruptive students, this would occupy most of the teacher’s day (as indeed it does for many inner-city teachers, particularly the junior teachers who bring a suburban school background to their inner-city teaching assignment).
Unfortunately, the personal experiences of most public officials, school reformers, and media types place them in the suburban-schools group. For people from this background, talk of the need to improve classroom management and discipline in the inner-city schools seems irrelevant, mean, authoritarian, condescending and/or racist. Indeed, my personal experience puts me squarely in the suburban-schools group — in the school environment I saw as a student in the 1950s-1960s and as a parent sitting in on our children’s classes in the 1980s-1990s, most of the students behaved appropriately most of the time and students rarely, if ever, directly challenged the teacher. So I was shocked when I accepted an inner-city teacher’s invitation to sit in her classes a few years ago — although the teacher had a reputation within the school for dealing effectively with misbehaving students, the students in her classes constantly acted out in minor ways, challenging the teacher’s authority and disrupting instruction. Observing other inner-city classes and talking with other inner-city teachers from around the country, I find that what I observed is the norm, not the exception.
Bottom line — it’s a mistake for those who have little/no personal experience with low-SES/inner-city schools to reject out-of-hand suggestions that low-SES/inner-city schools need different/stronger classroom management policies than suburban schools.
I think that one of the keys is a complete authoritarian style of teaching is not necessarily the best approach in most schools. It does not insure that students learn any better. It often times does not work in middle class schools either. I believe that we have to look at the children as children and keep in mind that not all children learn in the same way and that we need to respect this fact. Assuming that all the students in inner city schools are going to be combative is just not true. The expectations of the teachers play a key role here. I taught in the inner city schools and found that my attitude toward my students made a difference in my classroom. If there was one thing I learned as a teacher, it was that one size does not fit all.
16 of my 17 years were in Prince George’s County Maryland. In the two schools in which I taught we had a mix of kids, ranging from upper middle class to working class. We had kids in gangs. We had weapons among some kids, even in middle school – in 3 years we had two kids expelled for guns.
But in neither school did we have to have the kind of rigid disciplinarian approach some seem to think is the only way to teach difficult kids. You can even in a school full of such kids have a school culture that promotes a different approach. Imposing rigid discipline gets you sullen compliance – it does not teach the children to learn to exercise self-discipline and self-control. And you often wind up spending more time on “discipline” than you do on meaningful learning.
Some of the advice in the manual is standard stock behavioral management and it is effective. glorifying being a “bad ass” is not amusing nor is it good advice. Telling teachers to “pounce like a cat” and be automatic in responses is bad practice. I think what worries me the most is the statement that the MATCH teacher was a stellar student and thus unlike the children she will meet. It is this strain of superiority that distinguishes these programs as though the teacher is a missionary rather than a professional educator.
For those commenters who challenge the need for improving class management in the low-SES/inner-city schools:
Are you arguing that student behavior in the low-SES/inner-city schools is generally appropriate? If this is your position, how do you respond to the first-person books written by inner-city teachers (not just TFA grads) describing constant disruptive behavior as the norm? Or to the ed blog posts of veteran inner-city teachers to the same effect?
If you acknowledge that student behavior in the low-SES/inner-city schools is generally worse than in the suburban schools, do you agree that this difference in student behavior — particularly the constant disruption of instruction — might be seriously impacting the instructional process in the low-SES/inner-city schools?
What reforms do you suggest to improve student behavior in the low-SES/inner-city schools? Are you arguing that the teachers in those schools have weaker classroom management skills than the suburban teachers? Or that the lessons they are teaching are not as interesting? In other words, is the answer to discharge the teachers in the low-SES/inner-city schools? And replace them with suburban teachers who presumably possess stronger classroom management skills and teach more interesting lessons? Probably not.
Seems pretty clear that student behavior in the low-SES/inner-city schools is much worse — on average — than in the suburban schools + that this behavior is adversely impacting instruction (as well as burning out teachers) + that differences in teacher abilities between inner-city and suburban teachers are responsible for at most a small amount of the differences in student behavior (to the contrary, I’d bet that suburban teachers transferred to inner-city schools would be even less effective than the inner-city teachers they replaced in controlling disruptive student behavior).
Seems like the obvious answer is to implement significant reforms in classroom management techniques/discipline/etc. in the low-SES/inner-city schools. Any other ideas?
I want to be simplistic so as to not bore and get lost, but I’ll probably fail…classroom management is a top priority for teachers because without the cooperation of the students…not much learning can happen, no matter how much you know your content. My motto has been (in suburban and inner city schools) discipline first, teach second. I teach middle school social studies.
I coach procedures and routines for the first two weeks of school – getting started, when/how it is appropriate to do classroom business (trash, pencil sharpening, Kleenex, make up work, etc.) My discipline rewards good students (those not needing specific behavior correction all week) on a consistent basis, and uses demerits (tally marks of misbehavior) to consistently, and with minimal class disruption, redirect misbehavior. Being consistent and fair to each student is priority #1.
My suburban students are much easier to “control” than my inner city students. I feel like I “teach” more in suburbia; I felt more like a policeman in the inner city. I rarely come across students that can not read and write in my present situation, and I got discouraged by the amount of students that were illiterate in the inner city. My suburban students take more pride in not having been corrected all week than my inner city students where getting punished seemed to be a badge of honor. I did not resent their misbehavior; I just wanted to teach my subject, so I evacuated the inner city.
Over my 18 years, I have learned that I can “waste my time” fussing, yelling, and writing up students for misbehavior, or I can “waste my time” catching them being good, complimenting, thanking for cooperation, and writing positive postcards home. I have found that just one unexpected positive post card home creates more cooperation out of even the worst of kids than 3-5 strategically planned referrals!
I have learned that stating my expectations for partner work, and then using demerits to reward/correct expectation following, drives a positive classroom environment. And I still have days where kids can push me over the edge…
All of that said…I want to point out that my value added score in our pilot year put me at 88% effectiveness two school years ago. That would have me 2 points from the top 10% which would trigger reward pay and one year toward earning tenure (if I were a new teacher in LA). This year, I got a rating of 73%…that is 17% points from the “trigger” rating. I did the same things last year as the year before! The only thing that changed was I got a different group of kids. Now, I’m still considered well above the average teacher – according to value added …but I have no hope of earning bonus pay for at least five more years! I think I’d feel somewhat guilty if I did get it, knowing how hard my co-workers work and they are not eligible for even a step increase in wages without the mercy of our superintendent. Even under the business model, workers can expect reasonable step increases in pay – but there is much concern salaries here will be frozen, teachers laid off – allowable when a school system claims exigency – so teachers can be rehired at lower wages, and suffer non-contract renewals. My heart breaks for my brothers and sisters in teaching in the inner city schools where this is happening at an alarmingly faster pace.
I used to push and tell kids they should think of going into teaching as a profession. However, I have now told even my own 10 year old son that he should aspire to be a teacher with the same fervor as he would aspire to be a sewer diver.
Diane, while I am late to this blog post I have a solution for the privateers: if you really want faster “certified” teachers despite the Pandora’s Box one opens with this approach, fine. But don’t have the audacity to water down a definition of “highly qualified” (NCLB) and apply it to the Match-types.
i actually went to MATCH as a student. the school defiantly can be a little rigged in controlling behavior but i think that overall it is still very reasonable. i always had good relationship with my teachers but that does not mean they do not run the class the had to be the ultimate authority. if they were not the class would be chaos . lastly what is so bad about believing Belief 6: Even \”bad\” kids want to be good and do well. 99% of my friend in school even the one that slacked off and disturbed class everyday had other issues were looking for attention but they wanted to learn. it hurt them and made them angry when teacher just gave up on them. now i a 26 studying to be a teacher i don’t live in Boston so i am not at match and i don’t think it is the best program ever but wanting to have control of the classroom so student can learn and believing in all your student is not their sin.
and controlling behavior counts for a lot look at this :
CL=Lesson Quality * sum of Individual Student effort * (1 – behavior tax )
Let’s say Lesson Quality (more about what it is later) is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 “units” of quality.
The sum of Individual Student effort also is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 “units” of effort. (That’s what the ∑ stands for: “sum of.”)
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You don’t want to be as old as this guy and still have to play Whack-a-mole! It’s tiring!
Lesson Quality
∑Individual Student Effort
Misbehavior Tax

If your students pay NO misbehavior tax in a lesson, AND every single kid is maxing out her effort, AND your lesson quality is perfect, then your formula would look like this:
CL = 10 * 10 * (1-0.0) = 100
So, if you taught a perfect lesson, you would come out with 100 “units” of students learning (we realize that the concept of “learning units” is nonsensical—but it works for comparison). So that’s our starting point. A perfect lesson is 100 out of 100.
You’re not going to teach any perfect lessons. Let’s bring the formula into the real world of teaching, and create an example that might be happening right now in our school.
Let’s imagine a solid teacher: Mr. Solid Teacher. Good, not great, but definitely straightforward lessons, “let’s learn how to find the slope of a line”-type stuff. We’ll call the lesson quality an 8 out of 10.
Mr. Solid has good relationships with kids and their parents. So the kids will try reasonably hard for him. Reasonably hard, but not all out. It’s still school, it’s still not necessarily stuff they’re hungry to learn, they’re not super “into it.” Let’s call this level of student effort a 7. That is: Kid 1 is a 5 out of 10, Kid 2 is a 9 out of 10, and so on.
And let’s assume his classes have a 5% Misbehavior Tax, which is where we want you to be. He loses maybe 3 minutes total for a few demerits which he crisply handles.
In this example, Mr. Solid’s classroom learning formula would be:
Mr. Solid’s normal CL= 8 * 7 * (1-0.05) = 53 learning units
Not bad: the average kid got 53 units of learning. That’s a very solid class. (Don’t think of this number as 53 out of 100 = F). If you crank out a bunch of classes like this all year, kids will make pretty nice academic gains.
Let’s say you, Rookie Teacher, manage to get the same level of student effort as the Solid Teacher above. And let’s say you’re actually using Mr. Solid’s lesson plan about how to find the slope of a line, and you rehearsed it, so lesson quality is the same as his, too.
However, kids misbehave quite a bit in your class.
They arrive a minute late. Talk when they’re supposed to be working silently. Look at prom pictures under the desk. Make strange noises when you turn to the board.
In the end, the class ends up paying a 40% Misbehavior Tax – that’s the percentage of minutes, and the percentage of student energy, lost to these “small potatoes” violations.

For this lesson, your CL formula would look like this:
Your CL = 8 * 7 * (1 – 0.4) = 37 learning units Because of the misbehavior tax, your kids squeaked out only 37 units of learning.
That’s 30% less learning. That’s big! That’s equivalent to the whole achievement gap right there.