The Critical Role of Classroom Management

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. 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 inadequate progress academically, regardless of how similar or different they are regarding their academic achievement. Current research indicates that students in classes of teachers classified as most effective can be expected to gain about 52 percentile points in their achievement over a year’s time. Students in classes of teachers classified as least effective can be expected to gain only about 14 percentile points over a year’s time. This comparison is even more dramatic when one realizes that some researchers have estimated that students will exhibit a gain in learning of about 6 percentile points simply from maturation-from growing one year older and gleaning new knowledge and information through everyday life (see Hattie, 1992; Cahen & Davis, 1987).

The effective teacher performs many functions that can be organized into three major roles: (1) making wise choices about the most effective instruction strategies to employ, (2) designing classroom curriculum to facilitate student learning, and (3) making effective use of classroom management techniques (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Therefore, effective teachers have a wide array of instructional strategies at their disposal, are skilled at identifying and articulating the proper sequence and pacing of their content, are skilled in classroom management techniques.

In summary, the research over the past 30 years indicates that classroom management is one of the critical ingredients of effective teaching. The research resulted in two books on classroom management; one elementary level and one for the secondary level. The books, Classroom Management for the Elementary Teachers and Classroom Management for the Secondary Teacher by Carolyn Evertson, Edmund Emmer and Murray Worsham are considered the primary resources for the application of the research on classroom management to K-12 education (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock).