It’s time to abandon “classroom management”

By Courtney Luce

For starters, I imagine you are reading this because you think I am insane. You might be ready to fight with me because we (the collective “we” of educators) have all been taught, “a well managed classroom is the key to student learning!” I put this in quotes because I am certain I have said this exact phrase to my pre-service teachers at least more than once. But over the past two years, I have really been thinking about the implications of the phrase”classroom management.”

It all started with reading Albert Bandura’s research on agency while writing my dissertation. Bandura (2006) questions non-agentic theories of behavior because they follow a model of “bottom-up causation” in which “the environment acts on the biological machinery” (p. 167). Basically he argued that structuring an environment to act on sentient beings takes away agency. And schools are designed in this exact manner because we can’t have a bunch of kids doing whatever they want, right?

However, here’s the problem. Classroom management comes from the industrial model of education and really limits our ability to reform beyond that. The word “management” alone speaks to a boss-employee relationship, not a learner-facilitator relationship. Simply look at the definitions of management and you will find “be in charge of” or “administer and regulate.”

The definition of classroom management is even more about control. The online Glossary of Education Reform (2014) defines classroom management as “the wide variety of skills and techniques that teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class.” The teacher modules on the website for the American Psychological Association (APA) define classroom management as “the process by which teachers and schools create and maintain appropriate behavior of students in classroom settings” (2017).

In these definitions, the teacher is the one who is creating order and controlling the environment, attention, organizational structure, and productivity in the classroom. There is no room in these meanings for the type of student agency that can help students learn to regulate their own behavior, create organizational structures, or stay on task. If the teacher is controlling all of the behavior, what does the student learn?

The point of school isn’t school, so when we make decisions in education, we need to think about the impacts of it beyond the school walls. Few industries want to hire employees who wait to be told what to do, who aren’t able to manage their own focus, and who can’t effectively prioritize responsibilities. By putting all of the onus on the teacher managing the student, we take away time and training for teaching the students how to regulate themselves.

So yes, it’s time to throw out classroom management, and instead spend our time and energy teaching students the very important SEL skill of self-management, so that even when we are not present, the students can “be in charge of” or “administer and regulate” themselves.