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The following article was written by Professor Howard Seeman who teaches online classroom management courses with a particular emphasis on helping new teachers bridge between educational theory and the REAL “reality” of the classroom.  

Professor Seeman helps new teachers deal with these classroom management  obstacles with a wide array of classroom management support materials such as FREE online confidential help for classroom management concerns as well as classroom management online seminars, workshops, classroom management CDs, training videos and books. Professor Seeman’s classroom management materials have been successfully used in over 400 school districts and abroad. To read testimonials of his work, please click here.  

 Getting What You Didn’t Get/Should Have Gotten in Your Teaching Education Courses

You know the answer, what you didn’t get, should’ve got – in your teacher education courses.  When you ask teachers for over two decades what did they really need to be better teachers, they do not say: Piaget, Ericson, Maslow, or the history/philosophy of education, nor even better methods courses for teaching, e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem.

They say:
“We needed help with classroom management: discipline problems, effective classroom rules, procedures, handling students who don’t do the homework, who call out, curse, come in late, fight, throw things, and attack us.”

The Annual Gallup Poll of Public Schools for the past 22 years reports “lack of discipline” is the most serious problem facing the nation’s schools.

We lose potentially “good” teachers every year: 50% quit the profession within five years because of classroom disruptive behavior
(Jean Johnson Public Agenda 2/14/05)

What is wrong with teacher education for so many years that it has not helped teachers with what they really needed?

1.Most teacher education curricula taught in our nation’s colleges are loaded with too much abstract theory and too little realistic practical help. Courses in the history and philosophy of education, learning theory, and child development do help reframe teachers’ perceptions of students’ learning, but they do little to help teachers with their priority need: what to actually do in the classroom on the spot.

2.Why don’t we have more education professors who can teach the priorities of classroom management? Because their training is too conceptual. Unfortunately, teaching (and classroom management) is not just conceptual. Instead:

3.It is a Performance Art. It is also not like learning Math concepts and then plugging them in.Instead: teaching is more like playing jazz piano: where you learn concepts, practice reactions (e.g., learn to hear the chords), and then perform these responses spontaneously, interacting with the other musicians in such a way that you play with honest feeling in order to make “music” together.Or, it is like learning lion taming! where you learn and practice spontaneous decisions, using your feelings, personality, intuition to deliver the appropriate, correct reactions when confronted with the myriad of responses of those to be trained - when that door opens, without having too much time to think.         

4.Since teaching is a Performance Art, then we must face the uncomfortable fact that the most powerful tool in the classroom is not, e.g. the blackboard or even the computer, but the teacher’s personality. That is why Johnny can be a brat in period 3, then an angel in period 4. He did not change when the bell rang, his teacher did!

5.Thus, teachers need to look at their over-reactions, biases, inappropriate responses, displaced anger, and miscalled discipline problems. They need to learn how to correct these, practice appropriate responses: fairness, how to keep track of promises, warnings, systematic rewards, be properly assertive, and identify the causes of correctly identified disruptive behaviors.

6.Congruence. We have not been able to help teachers with the performance art of teaching because you cannot just tell teachers what to do, e.g., when Johnny does x. If a teacher does not respond congruently, authentically, is not being herself, real, honest,… whatever she tries, will be ineffective. Carl Rogers: “When a person delivers a message that does not really match his/her feelings, that person is being incongruent“. In other words, an incongruent teacher is phony; he has not really figured out how he feels, or what he really believes in. He seems to be acting like the TEACHER, from some kind of tape recorder in his head.

Congruent teachers have fewer discipline problems. We need to train teachers at being congruent, that helps establish this rapport with students. We need to help them with how to put their real person into their teacher, and how to practice this. We can.

1.We need to give teachers guidelines for effective rules, and suggested procedures for homework, warnings, rewards, handling cursing, but, not tell them exactly what to say or do. Then, we need to give them training exercises in these areas, exercises where they can find the responses that feel right for them, and then practice these, within helpful guidelines. There are also guidelines for effective rules that teachers can learn; and then, within them, help them to be themselves as they follow these. We can.

2.It is also difficult to train teachers to prevent and handle, e.g., discipline problems because many teachers are simply embarrassed to talk about these problems. In faculty lounges, they talk about their weekends, not that Johnny made a fool of them in period 3. Thus, in order to train teachers in classroom management, we need to first help teachers feel unalone with these problems. We can.

3.We need to help teachers not with just how to handle, e.g., discipline problems, but with how to prevent these problems. The best time to fix a problem is before it becomes one. We need to help teachers diagnose and locate the CAUSES of disruptive behavior.

4.One of the causes of discipline problems that we need to train teachers in is what I call: not making “miscalls”, viz., when a teacher calls a behavior a “discipline problem”, when it should have been labeled and handled differently. For example, if Johnny puts his head down on his desk in the back of the room, it might be better to call it an “education problem” and not hit it with a “hammer”. Instead, it may be better to use a “screwdriver”, e.g., let some behaviors slide for that moment, or use: “See me after class.” We sometimes need to retrain our reactions, e.g. to 15 typical “miscalls”. We can.

5.Also, we need to train teachers in not just “good lesson plans” but in the delivery of good lesson plans. The same on-paper lesson plan that is effective for teacher A, bombs for teacher B. Jay Leno does not get paid for his “lesson plan” of jokes written out for him. He gets paid for his delivery. We need to train teachers in this performance delivery, and how to practice this: timing and affective-effective momentum, not just teach them how to make good Lesson Plans. Stand up comics learn this art of delivery. Public speakers are coached in this area. We need to teach this art to teachers as well. We can.

Howard Seeman, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus, Lehman College, City University of New York, author of Preventing Classroom Discipline Problems, 3rd Ed. [Rowman/Littlefield Publishers], and Instructor/Consultant at: www.ClassroomManagementOnline.com