Training Our Future Teachers: Classroom Management. Revised
Author: Greenberg, Julie
Date: 2014-01-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Teacher Education Programs,Classroom Techniques,Teacher Competencies,Program Content,Assignments,Course Content,Student Teaching,Observation,Feedback (Response),Textbooks,Educational Research,Best Practices,Classroom Environment,Positive Reinforcement,Behavior Problems,Learner Engagement,Teacher Expectations of Students,Beginning Teachers,Student Motivation,Family School Relationship,Teacher Student Relationship,Course Descriptions,Coding,Foundations of Education

This report examines traditional teacher preparation in classroom management, which is a struggle for many teachers, especially new ones. 122 teacher preparation programs--both elementary and secondary, graduate and undergraduate--were examined to review the full breadth of the professional sequence. The following conclusions are made as a result of including lecture schedules, teacher candidate assignments, practice opportunities, instruments used to observe and provide feedback on teaching episodes, and textbooks in this examination: (1) Most programs can correctly claim to cover classroom management, with only a tiny fraction (less than 3 percent) in the sample ignoring instruction altogether; (2) Most teacher preparation programs do not draw from research when deciding which classroom management strategies are most likely to be effective and therefore taught and practiced; (3) Instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced; and (4) Contrary to the claims of some teacher educators, effective training in classroom management cannot be embedded throughout teacher preparation programs. The report identifies the classroom management strategies that garner the strongest research support and looks at the extent to which programs teach and offer practice in these strategies in instructional and clinical coursework, as well as in student teaching. Considerable research exists on classroom management, much of it consolidated into three authoritative summaries of 150 studies conducted over the last six decades. The agreement among studies that some classroom management strategies are more likely to be effective than others helped isolate the five most important strategies on which to train teacher candidates. The following training strategies are known as the &quot;Big Five&quot;: (1) Rules; (2) Routines; (3) Praise; (4) Misbehavior; and (5) Engagement. The &quot;Big Five&quot; serve as the yardstick for this study, measuring the extent to which teacher preparation programs are training teachers in research-based classroom management strategies. [This January 2014 version of the report includes minor revisions of the original December 2013 version. Listed appendices are not included in this report: (1) Teacher preparation programs included in this study; (2) Methodology; (3) Inventory of research on classroom management in PK-12 classrooms; (4) Crosswalk of classroom management models and the Big Five; (5) Cross-program analyses; (6) How NCTQ [National Council on Teacher Quality] develops standards for the &quot;Teacher Prep Review&quot;; and (7) Sample demographics. Numerous organizations sponsored this work. The full list can be seen in the document.]