"Classroom management" doesn't work

I began my teaching career as part of a fellowship program, so during my first several years I had easy access to a cohort of fellow rookie teachers with whom I could share ideas and strategies (when things were going well) or commiserate (more commonly). Without a doubt, the most recurring topics of conversation surrounded "classroom management"(1). This does not appear to be a local phenomenon, either, considering the frequency with which classroom management strategies appear in educational literature.

Students in low-academically-performing schools, it seemed from these conversations, universally engage in certain behaviors: they are on their phones during instructional time; they talk while the teacher is talking; they talk while classmates are talking; they talk during quiet work time; they fail to follow basic instructions; they act out publicly in disruptive ways; they are defiant; and so on. If we as teachers could somehow "manage" these behaviors, we assumed, we could finally get down to the business of learning. In our ideal world, students would enter the classroom or PE area, quickly and quietly begin work on a prompt written on a whiteboard, calmly await instructions from the teacher upon finishing, listen attentively during direct instruction, and then work silently and independently on assigned work. We pulled out all stops to this end: we created classroom routines; we called parents for support; we docked points from grades; we rewarded good behavior with trinkets, food, or free time; we sang and danced and tried to prove that learning is FUN, all caps; and so on.

And none of it worked.

There are a million explanations for our failures. We were young, inexperienced, and disorganized in our instruction. It's likely some students acted up because they found the curriculum so unchallenging that they found stimulation elsewhere, in apps or side conversations. Other students probably acted up because they were overwhelmed by the difficulty of the very same material, and took respite in behaviors in which they had more mastery: social status games, for example. Some students certainly didn't learn best in a traditional classroom setting at all, and, intuitively realizing this, chose to ignore most of what was being presented. Prior traumatic life experiences certainly made behavior regulation difficult for some students. And this is just to touch on a few possible explanations.

There is a silver lining to all this, however. Our perceived breakdown in classroom discipline really just laid bare the problems with the structure of traditional schooling (2) itself.

We actually already know that learning happens through exploration, trial and error, and following unique and personal interests. To share a personal example, my preferred method of engaging with difficult ideas is through conversation and debate -- often loud, contentious and spontaneous -- which is a medium that does not easily lend itself to a classroom of 40 or more other students. As teachers, our priority should be to foster learning and development; focusing on behavior management is often really just a desire for compliance and obedience. And to whatever extent compliance and obedience are valuable skills for adult life, they are skills that are developed through the process of maturing (i.e., aging), not through circus-animal-style behavior/reward training. As hormones balance and the brain develops over time, skills like the ones required to sit quietly through a PowerPoint presentation evolve organically (3). More significantly, we should of course hope to produce graduates who can focus intensely such that they can read Shakespeare, Dickinson, or Angelou - or perform a six-month weightlifting macrocycle focused on increasing displays of speed and power. But we cannot beat this focus into our students through force of will, reward and punishment, or by trying to disguise these difficult endeavors as goofy lessons that don't require studious effort. Students must arrive at these adult skills on their own time and in their own way. We as teachers don't need to be raking ourselves over the coals trying to get kids to behave in ways that are developmentally inappropriate.

Before I am swarmed with all the possible worst-case scenarios that could arise from the above suggestion -- How will any kids learn if they're allowed to do whatever they want?! Who will keep them safe?! -- allow me to suggest that academic environments already exist that closely resemble the one I favor, and it looks a lot like recess. Kids cannot do whatever they want during recess. They cannot hit, kick, bully, curse at, or otherwise harm other children. They cannot engage in behavior that might harm themselves. What they can do is explore their own interests and develop their own skills at their own speed, and in their own way. Teachers can coax, redirect, instruct, and soothe, but during those blissful 15 or 20 minutes (way too short, by the way, but that is a topic for another essay), even the most totalitarian-style disciplinarians seem to understand that a child's time during recess is her own. Kids develop their own interests, experiment with strategies away from the pressure of formal assessments, and form authentic social skills. At the high school level, exploration may not look quite so much like free play (although it certainly could). It will likely look more like exercise at the YMCA. Walk into a local YMCA and you'll see a group of adults playing pick-up basketball, another group participating in a music-fueled workout class, another group lifting weights independently. Recreating this on a school site requires more coordination between teachers, and looks messier to outside observers, but aren't those minor issues preferable to attempting to corral 50 students into acting like synchronized storm troopers, when that strategy almost never works?

I have only ever taught in under-resourced communities, so I suspect that in more affluent schools teachers are able to gain more compliance than I could as a young teacher. Yet students in affluent areas often have parents for whom a favorable high school G.P.A. led to a college admission, which led to a degree, which led to a job and a middle- or upper-class salary. Those students have every reason to be deferential to such a system, painful and obsolete as it may be. My students have generally experienced more trauma, more racism, more hardship, more hunger, and as a result, I believe, are less likely to "take my word for it" that obedience in my class leads to any real desirable outcome for their future. Why would they believe me? I do not feel that they are too cynical, too unprepared, or too unmotivated to conform to 1950s-era classroom structures and educations. I believe they are too smart. We just do not do a good job evaluating this type of intelligence. Ibram X. Kendi writes:

What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low-testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism? …. What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas? What if our educational system focused on opening minds instead of filling minds and testing how full they are? What if we realized the best way to standardize a highly effective educational system is not by standardizing our tests but by standardizing our schools to encourage intellectual openness and difference?

It’s my contention that standardizing behavior expectations for students is as unreasonable as measuring intellect with standardized testing, and that these ideas are connected in any case.

So what does learning look like without a traditional focus on behavior management? For one thing, it might be loud, if students are engaged in academic discussion, or if they're able to simply be social during a given activity (how many hundreds of hours did I spend talking about mundane topics while training as a high school distance runner, while concurrently increasing my fitness and discipline?). It might appear chaotic, as individual students may be working on different tasks at the same time. It might not involve direct instruction at all, and instead employ tools such as peer-to-peer conversation or modeling, as uncomfortable as this may make some teachers who think of themselves as the deliverers and providers of knowledge.

What do behavior expectations look like in such a setup, then? We need to merely focus on the core values that (hopefully) guide our adult lives already: we must not inflict violence on each other; we must respect each other and our differences; we must allow each other to learn in our own ways. These are real, moral values. They exist in any free society. They are not some invented rules designed to produce students who can sit with knees and hips at 90 degree angles for hours on end.

Focus on what matters. That’s really how simple it should be, for behavior expectations, for instruction, for physical education.

-----

1. To ensure clarity of discussion, we need a common definition of the term, and the Wikipedia definition of classroom management is sufficient: "a term teachers use to describe the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly without disruptive behavior from students compromising the delivery of instruction. The term also implies the prevention of disruptive behavior preemptively, as well as effectively responding to it after it happens."

2. For example, a comprehensive high school with a rigid bell schedule, predetermined curriculum for graduation requirements, etc.

3. https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/teens-neuroscience-and-society