Classroom Management and Culture - Research and Resources

"If you’re looking for a book on how to “control” your students, this isn’t it! Instead, this is a book on what classroom learning could be if we aspire to co-create more culturally responsive and equitable environments—environments that are safe, affirming, learner-centered, intellectually challenging, and engaging."

This article presents two case study examples of culturally responsive classroom management and highlights several key principles in culturally responsive classroom management practices.

"Drawing from the literature on culturally responsive classroom management, psychologically supportive classroom environments, and building resilience, the authors describe the practices used by three effective novice teachers in urban elementary classrooms during the first 2 hours of the first day of school."

This article examines strategies and approaches for culturally responsive classroom management, reflecting on the way that classroom management practices can promote or obstruct equal access to learning.

"This qualitative study focused on the life histories of four female African-American middle level teachers. The findings illuminate how culturally responsive caring can and should be foundational to successful teaching that does not discriminate but instead uplifts every student and assures them that teachers will seek to know, understand, teach, and not degrade them. Elements of this caring framework include serving as students’ otherparents or fictive kin, taking time to know students without judgment, appreciating the knowledge in students’ communities, believing in students’ brilliance and holding them accountable in warm yet demanding ways, teaching racial history and teaching students to speak back to negative profiles that define them, and never sugarcoating injustices but teaching for success."

This book offers steps that teachers can take to critically reflect on their management styles, and provides strategies and approaches for culturally responsive classroom management.

This book provides an overview of the research done on classroom management, including programs and strategies, classroom management in context, social and psychological perspectives, and other factors involved in classroom management. (For culturally responsive classroom management, see chapter 21.)

"This toolkit seeks to reframe classroom management by questioning the assumption that teachers must always lead and be in control and that students must always follow. This model supports teachers in responding to student behavior with the goal of keeping learning on track rather than keeping absolute control. It focuses on student development instead of punishment."

This article is intended to open a conversation around culturally responsive classroom management, and proposes a conception of culturally responsive classroom management built around 5 components.

This book explores an approach to teaching and learning called the SEEK approach intended to improve student motivation, knowledge acquisition, retention, and academic success. The final chapter addresses using the SEEKING system to improve student attention and engagement (link below).

This article presents the results of a study designed to examine "the effects of physical exertion and cognitive engagement induced by physical activity breaks on primary school children's attention."

"For students to thrive and achieve at high levels, they must be interested and emotionally invested in their learning. Why? Because motivation, or the desire that propels one to do something, leads to engagement, where students are being attentive to their tasks, putting forth positive effort, persisting through challenges, and advancing their ideas and understandings with a sense of intention."

In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.

Instructors should coordinate "fluctuations between internal and external attention across students, allowing students the time to focus externally on the information presented and internally to consider new information more deeply and connect it with their prior knowledge."

This article discusses two research-based strategies for motivating reluctant learners: cognitive interest cues and personal goal setting.

"For students with anxiety, the path to engagement requires both accomodations and skill building."

Fisher and Frey provide a continuum of student engagement based on research from Amy Berry, from "disruptive" to "driving."

These authors discusses how "deeper learning" doesn't automatically lead to greater student motivation, and lists several strategies to encourage greater motivation.

These authors discuss how disengagement can sometimes be hidden, and that even students who look engaged may not be.

This article discusses how teachers can tap into students' basic psychological needs to keep them engaged.

An interview with Zaretta Hammond, a former teacher, an author, a curriculum designer and trainer, is presented. Topics discussed include student engagement and instructional equity, the common mistakes of schools with regards to student engagement, and ways for schools to address the issue of instructional gaps as a result of the pandemic.

The author reflects on creating lessons that aim to generate student engagement. Topics discussed include the two conditions needed for lesson activities to generate student engagement, the reasons behind the failure of the author's lesson plan to generate student engagement, and the importance of understanding and accepting students.

This UDL principle discusses how learners differ in the ways they can be engaged or motivated to learn, and gives three guidelines on how to provide multiple means of engagement.

This study explored primary school students’ engagement and burnout profiles and how different profiles interacted with perceived classroom teaching styles (i.e., autonomy-supportive & autonomy suppressive)....Collectively, the study indicated that autonomy-supportive teaching behaviors are pivotal in understanding student engagement and school burnout.

This paper finds that despite being employed with good intent, engagement operates in a paradigm of normativity... I critique engagement discourse and its historical context to find that it reproduces a longstanding tradition of psychologising public problems, thereby displacing conversations about what may be the most influential issue of public education: social and economic inequality."

This article demonstrates that teacher-student relationships have an important but not exclusive role in student engagement.

Multilevel analysis showed that behavioral engagement (defined as effort and perseverance in learning) and emotional engagement (defined as sense of belonging) significantly predicted reading performance.

The authors present four classroom management strategies that teachers can use to help students transition from one activity to another.

This article reports the results of a study of three high school teachers who were provided with feedback on the number of seconds devoted to transitions and then successful implementation of classroom time management strategies.

This article discusses of the effectiveness of a picture activity schedule on one student's ability to complete rountines and transition between activities in a kindergarten classroom.

This article examines the effects of environmental modifications on transitions in inclusion classrooms.

In this article, the authors theorize that transition time between activities would decrease "when preplanned songs or sound stimuli were used to prepare and support young children of forthcoming change." They present three case studies in which music seemed to effectively help children transition throughout the school day.

This article describes the results of a study intended to evaluate the effectiveness of visual activity schedules on the behaviour of four students with moderate autism during transitions within a self-contained classroom.

This article examines the process of transitioning in three high school classes, highlighting where students and teachers struggled with transitions and providing suggestions for tying activities together to smooth out transitions.

The purpose of this article is to "provide tools for preschool professionals to plan for transitions between daily routines, identify challenging transitions during the day, and offer strategies to support transitions in classrooms to prevent challenging behaviors from occurring due to frequent changes."

This report examines how emotional expression, including tone, can be used to enhance student learning. The author emphasizes that programs that programs that "deem just one style of communication acceptable during discipline may in fact be needlessly excluding diverse teaching styles and disregarding the cultural assets of the teachers who use them."

"This study operationalizes warm demander pedagogy as a component of culturally responsive teaching"

If you are using the language of warm demanders, this article has interesting insights for teacher educators on white, novices teachers doing this with black and brown students.

"Integrating the theories of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, this article presents a theoretical and empirical analysis for conceptualizing school classrooms as ritualized spaces that shape the roles, relationships, and interactions of students and teachers. This analysis is then used to examine the impact of one urban classroom that employed new classroom rituals to disrupt the traditional practices and performative roles of students and teachers. The article argues that disruptive rituals play an important role in efforts to transform patterns of social interactions in urban classrooms."