Classroom Management That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Every Teacher

Teachers play various roles in a typical classroom, but surely one of the most important is that of classroom manager. Effective teaching and learning cannot take place in a poorly managed classroom. If students are disorderly and disrespectful, and no apparent rules and procedures guide behavior, chaos becomes the norm. In these situations, both teachers and students suffer. Teachers struggle to teach, and students most likely learn much less than they should. In contrast, wellmanaged classrooms provide an environment in which teaching and learning can flourish. But a well-managed classroom doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It takes a good deal of effort to create—and the person who is most responsible for creating it is the teacher.

We live in an era when research tells us that the teacher is probably the single most important factor affecting student achievement—at least the single most important factor that we can do much about. To illustrate, as a result of their study involving some 60,000 students, S. Paul Wright, Sandra Horn, and William Sanders (1997) note the following:

The results of this study will document
that the most important factor affecting
student learning is the teacher. In addi-
tion, the results show wide variation
in effectiveness among teachers. The
immediate and clear implication of this
finding is that seemingly more can be
done to improve education by improv-
ing the effectiveness of teachers than by
any other single factor. Effective teachers
appear to be effective with students of all
achievement levels regardless of the levels of
heterogeneity in their classes. If the teacher
is ineffective, students under that
teacher's tutelage will achieve inade-
quate progress academically, regardless
of how similar or different they are
regarding their academic achievement.
(p. 63) [emphasis in original]

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