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Teachers' classroom controlprocedures: are students'preferences being met?Ramon Lewis a & Malcolm Lovegrove ba School of Education, La Trobe University , Bundoora 3083,Victoria, Australiab School of Education, La Trobe University , Bundoora 3083,Victoria, AustraliaPublished online: 07 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Ramon Lewis & Malcolm Lovegrove (1984) Teachers' classroom controlprocedures: are students' preferences being met?, Journal of Education for Teaching:International research and pedagogy, 10:2, 97-105, DOI: 10.1080/0260747840100201

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0260747840100201

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Teachers' classroom controlprocedures: are students'preferences being met?

RAMON LEWISSchool of Education, La Trobe University, Bundoora 3083, Victoria, Australia

MALCOLM LOVEGROVESchool of Education, La Trobe University, Bundoora 3083, Victoria, Australia

The issue of classroom control is of considerable interest to parents and teachers. Inan attempt to determine to what extent teachers' techniques in this area approximateto those preferred by students, an analysis is presented which is based on a numberof published studies. The results indicate that teachers are generally meeting theneeds of students with the notable exception that they are appearing angered and arepublicly embarrassing students. Although the messages transmitted by teachers aredemocratic in nature, the manner in which they are transmitted is not.

Research into teacher effectiveness has had a long history which can becharacterized as having three phases or cycles (Tisher, 1978; Medley, 1979;Travers, 1978; Rosenshine, 1976). The first was concerned with the exam-ination of teacher personality and characteristics, the second with teacher-student interaction and the third with the nature and quality of instruction.Regardless of which phase was current, the major concern has been to chartrelationships between teacher traits and skills and instructional outcomes asmeasured by cognitive gains in students.

In the last ten years, however, researchers aiming to establish theeffectiveness of particular teaching practices or teacher characteristics havefrequently found it useful to use, as independent variables, measures otherthan the gain in student cognitive achievement. One of the most important ofthese measures is a variable called student 'time on task' or 'opportunity tolearn'. This variable refers to the amount of time students spend engaged indesired learning tasks. Measures of time on task have ranged from the amountof curriculum time devoted to the study of mathematics to the time studentsspend attending, while the teacher talks. The variable has been utilized as botha predictor of achievement and an outcome of instruction.

The earlier studies which considered time on task as a predictor variable

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established a direct and strong relationship between time on task and studentgain in cognitive achievement (Hook and Rosenshine, 1979). Later studieshave assumed this relationship and therefore used time on task as an outcomevariable in place of student achievement. So accepted has the importance oftime on task become that Bloom (1980) asserts that:

Time on task is . . . one of the variables that account for learningdifferences between students, between classes, and even betweennations, (p. 383)

Many studies have, therefore, tested for the effectiveness of specific teachingbehaviours by studying their influence on time on task, and one of the majorassumptions underlying our research is that teacher behaviours whichmaximize students' time on task facilitate students' acquisition of cognitivegoals.

The area of teacher behaviour to which we have directed our interests isone which is critical to the process of instruction: classroom control. As Charles(1981) puts it:

Discipline, class control, classroom management - by whatever name youcall it, keeping order in the classroom is a teacher's greatest concern. Youmay not like that fact; you may wish it weren't true. But it is. That's a givenin the daily life of teachers. Discipline is so crucial, so basic to everythingelse in the classroom, that most educators agree: it is the one thing thatmakes or breaks teachers. . . . If students don't stay on task, they don'tlearn. At least they don't learn what they are supposed to. If they do whatever they want, the best plans, activities, and materials don't mean athing. It needn't be the whole class that misbehaves. Three or fourstudents, even one, can so disrupt a class that learning becomesimpossible for even the best behaved students, (p. 13)

The issue of student misbehaviour and its control is of considerableinterest to parents and teachers. As McDaniel recently stated, 'The public putssuch emphasis on good school discipline that its absence is cited as the numberone problem in America today' (1981, p. 31). To justify his claim, McDanielreferences American Gallup polls which indicate that 'for the tenth time in thelast eleven years, school discipline is perceived by the public as education'smost important problem' (p. 43).

Our particular interest in the area of classroom discipline stems from abelief that time on task is a product of a teacher's control skills and theirinteraction with students' perceived preferences. This opinion has beenrecently expressed in the Australian Journal of Education for Teaching by Smyth(1981). We believe that if teachers utilize the sort of control techniques studentsprefer, then students will, in the course of a school day, be less disrupted andtherefore spend more time on task.

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May 1984 Teachers' classroom control procedures 99

In our work it was inappropriate to replicate the methodology of most ofthe previous research conducted in the area of classroom control which usedobservations of teachers and pupils or questioned teachers. This was partlybecause of methodological difficulties associated with these sources of data.Teachers, apart from being relatively unreliable reporters of their classroombehaviour (Hook and Rosenshine, 1979), were unlikely to provide valid dataon their behaviour in an area as sensitive as discipline. Similarly, observationof teachers was likely to influence their classroom control behaviour andthereby make the measure invalid. In addition, student misbehaviour and theteacher's response to it are relatively infrequent occurrences and thereforemany lessons would need to be observed to obtain a reliable sample of ateacher's behaviour.

Equally as important as methodological considerations, however, was thefact that the focus of the research was on those control techniques used byteachers which were preferred by students. This clearly required an investi-gation of the views of students.

During 1981 and 1982 we undertook a series of studies aimed at exploringstudents' perception of teachers' control behaviour. To assess the variety ofteacher-control behaviour which was relevant to the aims of the studies, wecommenced by identifying the approximate range of control behaviours beingcurrently practised in schools. This information was obtained by conductingand analysing taped interviews with one class of grade nine students in each offive coeducational state schools in metropolitan Melbourne. These interviewsformed the basis of a questionnaire which was compiled using the pupils' ownlanguage. The questionnaire was designed to provide information on thoseteaching characteristics and classroom control practices perceived as typifyingboth 'good' and 'bad' teachers.

After its reliability was established, the questionnaire, which includedforty-six descriptions of classroom control practices, was administered to 264grade nine students in eleven state coeducational schools in Melbourne. Thestudents provided indications of the extent to which each of the practicescharacterized the best and worst teacher they had experienced in the last threeyears.

To obtain some insight into the criteria that students were using toidentify 'good' teachers, some additional items were included on thequestionnaire. Students combined aspects of teaching skill, the teacher'spersonality and the quality of the teacher-student relationship in determiningwhich teachers were 'good' (Lewis and Lovegrove, 1983a).

A second study involved 364 grade nine students (attending sixteenclasses in nine schools) in describing the classroom control practices of theircurrent teachers and they also indicated the extent to which they liked theteacher. The assumptions underlying the collection of these data were that thetechniques utilized by teachers who were most liked would be those that meet

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students' needs and that this criterion is as significant for defining'appropriate' teacher behaviour as is direct influence on cognitive gains. Thefindings of the investigation are reported more fully in Lewis and Lovegrove,1983a and 1983b.

Briefly, it was possible to identify a number of classroom managementfactors which students perceive as critical in ensuring that their preferences aremet in the area of 'discipline' orientated interaction. The first of these is teachercalmness. Students perceive 'the best' teachers as those who remain calm whentelling off miscreants. They argue that teachers should 'remain calm whentelling kids off for misbehaving' and not become 'angry' and 'yell or swear atmisbehaving kids', thereby minimizing embarrassment.

The second factor is rule clarity and reasonableness. Students perceive thatrules should be made clear and be based not on the personalized authority ofthe teacher, but on authority integral to the teacher's role of co-ordinator of thelearning environment. They therefore support reasons for sanctions that relateto the teacher's desire to protect all students from unreasonable disruption totheir learning.

The third factor is called appropriate punishment and is one which iscentred on the types of sanctions utilized by teachers: students see their needsmet by teachers who refrain from the use of unreasonable extremes of punish-ment (for example, hitting, demanding apologies, confiscating objects andremoving privileges). Teachers should also avoid the use of what may beconstrued as 'arbitrary' punishments which have no logical connection to themisbehaviour. Instead, students would argue that teachers should giveexplanations to miscreants, warn them, and then separate them from otherstudents. The teachers should also have misbehaving students catch up onwork missed due to their misbehaviour.

Factor four relates to fairness. Students perceive as appropriate teachingbehaviour the giving of fair warning to students, and the clear identification ofthe appropriate miscreant.

The final factor pertains to acceptance of responsibility. It appears that thebest teachers are more likely to be seen as taking responsibility for maintaininga learning atmosphere in their classroom and not rejecting their disciplinaryrole or attempting to place the responsibility elsewhere, for example on otherteachers or parents. This finding is particularly significant given the recentobservations of Duke and Meckel (1980) on the high frequency of role rejectionamong persons expected to perform discipline-related functions in schools.

The degree to which teachers are actually meeting students' preferences inthe five areas described above can be inferred by considering the extent towhich students' perceptions of teachers' current classroom control practicesaccord with those they attribute to good teachers. This'allowed us to determinehow closely the teacher's behaviour approximated to the students' ideal.

We concluded that teachers were clearly meeting students' preferences in

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four of the five areas outlined above, namely rule clarity and reasonableness,fairness, the use of appropriate punishment and acceptance of responsibility.For example they are described by students as having clear rules based on theneed for a suitable learning environment, as providing warnings to miscreantsand as generally restricting punishment to the miscreant and avoidinginvolving innocent bystanders. In addition, teachers are perceived as usingappropriate sanctions, for example, 'punishments' which would be consideredas 'logical consequences' of the students' behaviour (Dreikurs and Grey, 1968)and as avoiding harsh or arbitrary punishments. Finally, they are notinvolving other teachers or parents in the control of the miscreant.

It is interesting to contemplate the relative infrequency of what may beviewed as 'arbitrary' discipline behaviours such as strapping, hitting,removing privileges, having lines written, yard duty performed or extra schoolwork completed, when not so long ago the strapping of children was anaccepted and frequently used procedure for maintaining school discipline.Similarly, 'punishments' as arbitrary as picking up papers in the school yard,writing lines, digging garden beds, copying pages from texts, etc. weregenerally recognized as acceptable, even by those 'progressive' teachers whosaw themselves as strongly caring for the rights of students and who stressedthe quality of their relationships with students. There was little belief that theimposition of such punishments was at variance with the professional role of aclassroom teacher. Clearly, however, many of these sanctions are now onlyrarely used by teachers. Why?

Two major competing explanations appear plausible. The first is based onan assumption that schools have become places in which the rights ofindividual students have taken on a new meaning. This recognition of theworth of the individual derives in part from a realization that the school is nolonger a place where students are provided mainly with the knowledge andskills necessary to ensure their full and active participation in the world ofwork. Schools have become institutions with a much broader set of attitudinalaims. They have become entrusted with the development in students of manyof the social and leisure skills and attitudes such as were once the exclusivedomain of parents. Correspondingly, the importance of work-relatedknowledge appears to have been de-emphasized, with numeracy and literacybeing two of the remaining bastions of essential learning.

Within this context, it is not unexpected that teachers should see fit toreview their relationships with students in a bid to determine if it is the sort ofrelationship which would facilitate the personal (rather than professional)development of students. Given such a re-evaluation of teacher-studentrelationships and the 'freeing-up' of the curriculum, it would not be surprisingto find teachers wishing to make students more responsible not only for thecontent and process of their curriculum, but also for their own behaviour. Ingeneral, teachers would be seeking to promote a more egalitarian type of

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school society. They would, therefore, wish to minimize manifestingpersonalized power by imposing arbitrary sanctions on students as this mayinhibit the quality of the relationship that they may establish with them. Incontrast, they would view the student as someone with whom to negotiate asolution to any disruptive behaviour and would utilize the power invested inthe teaching role to encourage students to engage in negotiation.

Therefore, the first of the potential explanations of the findings of theresearch suggests that the relative absence of arbitrary punishments is a resultof teachers adopting a new 'democratic' view of the role of students, consistentwith the increasing emphasis in schools on the personal development ofchildren.

The second possible explanation for teachers' infrequent use of arbitrarypunishments is less complimentary. This alternative explanation is based onan assumption that the changes in teachers' behaviour are a result of un-thinking reaction. The need for a reaction has arisen as a result of two factorsover which teachers have no control. The first of these is a shift in societalvalues, a movement well described by Balson (1982) who argues:

The type of society which supported the superior-inferior continuum andthe resultant pattern of interpersonal relationships started to change inthe late 1950s. Beginning with the Black Power movement, there was aseries of similar social revolts including women's liberation, studentpower movement, and the industrial power movement. All had incommon a refusal by a traditional inferior group to accept a position ofinferiority. Whites found that they could no longer dominate the colouredpeople while men, parents, and teachers found a similar resistancewhenever they attempted to impose their values on women, children, andstudents respectively, (p. 3)

The second factor which may have created a need for teachers to appeardemocratic and resist the temptation to administer arbitrary punishments maybe termed the 'bankruptcy' of the curriculum. Today's economic situation ischaracterized by relatively large numbers of unemployed among the popu-lation and more particularly among school leavers. Many students, therefore,have come to believe that schooling can no longer be justified primarily interms of the school's ability to provide job-related knowledge and skills;skills which used to ensure the employability of its products. Thus they willnot accept unpleasant teacher behaviour for the sake of their vocationaltraining.

Raffini (1980) appears to be alluding to the implications of the effect ofboth factors when he discusses students of the past:

They, unlike the present generation, were goal-oriented; they werewilling to subordinate themselves and their identities to the tasks or jobs

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that had to be done. While they may not have enjoyed studying or doingthe work required in schools any more than present-day students, theyrealized that they must force themselves to do it anyway if they wanted tobetter themselves in society. The task, job, or goal was the overridingconsideration; their identities or feelings of satisfaction came second.Glasser believes that children are no longer willing to subordinate them-selves, their sense of worth, or their personal identities to the goals of theschool. They seek reinforcement as persons, as separate human beingsfirst, before they become involved with goals or tasks, (p. 18)

To determine which of the two competing explanations outlined abovepertains most to the teachers referred to in our studies, it is useful to considerthe only one of the five areas of management behaviour where students' needsare clearly not being met.

Although, as stated earlier, students perceive as appropriate teacherbehaviour in the areas of rule clarity and reasonableness, fairness, the use ofappropriate punishment, and acceptance of responsibility, they neverthelessreport that, as a group, teachers are apparently engaging in a number ofbehaviours which are inappropriate. Firstly, they are using public embarrass-ment of students to control classes and secondly, they are not remaining calm,but are yelling when admonishing students.

It is interesting to reflect on these additional findings and to reconcile theircoexistence with the teachers' use of what appear to be democratic sanctions.In a recent text, Raffini (1980) has blended and augmented the ideas of ThomasGordon, Rudolf Dreikurs and William Glasser to produce a technique he callsbehaviour negotiation. He argues that it is not easy to discriminate between anautocratic and a democratic approach to classroom discipline by simplyfocusing on the type of punishment given. Raffini found that exclusionseemed to be the most widely used logical consequence in the management ofclassroom disruption, but with some teachers the distinction between usinglogical consequences and punishment was not always clear (p. 134). He urgedthat teachers, when using logical consequences, adopt an unemotional tone ofvoice. 'A simple, matter of fact statement is made in a calm, friendly manner.'Therefore, the key distinction between the democratic and autocraticapproaches has as much to do with the medium as the message, and althoughthe messages transmitted by teachers may be democratic in nature, the mannerin which they are transmitted is not.

One can conclude, given the prevalence of the perceived use of criticismand the presence of teacher anger in classrooms, that teachers are not acting inaccordance with a democratic model, even though they are avoiding the use ofobviously 'autocratic' forms of punishment. There are at least two competingexplanations for these findings. The first of these is the same as the second ofthe explanations offered above - teachers may have unthinkingly 'rolled with

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the punches' and have gone as far as they want to go in reacting to socialpressures.

In contrast they may have, as explained earlier, gone through a process ofrevaluing their relationships with students and would wish neither to scarenor embarrass them. However, they may not be able to operationalize theirintentions, and fall back on the use of anger and embarrassment out offrustration, knowing that these techniques, although theoretically un-desirable to them, are effective means of correcting unacceptable behaviour.

The decision as to which of these two competing explanations applies isnot solely of academic interest.

The findings of this research have implications for the education ofpractising teachers, and for pre-service education. In the training of teachersmuch attention is traditionally devoted to 'skill training'; sessions at whichteachers practise teaching skills. For example, students attend micro-teachingor simulation sessions during which they attempt to practise particular typesof teaching behaviour, observe the degree to which they have adopted thesebehaviours and then try to do better. However, it is not only the behaviour ofteachers and students in training that may need to be considered, it may alsobe their beliefs as they relate to the individual worth of children.

It is clearly necessary to develop quite different 'curricula' for pre-serviceand in-service teachers, depending on whether an attempt is being made toinfluence their mouths or their minds. If the former, then texts like Raffini(1980), Charles (1981) or Balson (1982) will provide alternative models ofmanagement that could be investigated. However, if it is not techniques thatare required but a systematic rethink of the teacher's conception of the purposeof discipline and the significance of the child's psychological and emotionaldevelopment, then more basic issues would need to be considered. Forexample, teachers may need to determine the extent to which the psycho-logical well-being of the non-conforming student need be considered whenattempting to ensure that an adequate learning environment is provided forthe remainder of the class.

These considerations may be of relevance to a far wider audience ofteachers than those in Australia, in the light of the studies we have conductedin the United States of America and Norway. Although we have not yetgathered data on teachers' classroom management behaviour in thesecountries, we have reported on students' preferences (Lovegrove, Lewis,^yvind and Strtjmnes, 1983; Lovegrove, Lewis, Fall and Lovegrove, 1983).These data clearly indicate that students' preferences for particular types ofdiscipline techniques are characterized by a far greater degree of similaritythan they are by differences. Therefore, if the discipline procedures used byteachers in the countries in which we have conducted our studies do not varygreatly, there may be implications for teachers' education and re-education ina variety of national contexts.

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