How does classroom management affect students’ behavior?

Classroom management is a process, as well as a set of skills and strategies, that teachers and schools use to create and maintain appropriate behavior of students in the classroom. Education researchers have studied this topic and identified evidence-based classroom management strategies that are effective in enhancing social behavior and increasing academic achievement. These principles can work across almost all subject areas, grade levels, and developmental differences (Mellish, 2017).

Proper classroom management creates an ideal environment for learning. This is important for teacher and student safety, happiness and productivity. A successful classroom management system will help prevent teacher burnout and reduce the need for yelling, scolding or other stressful discipline methods that cause friction between teacher and student. This kind of environment enhances learning, as well as social/emotional development. Managing a classroom is more than simply establishing a set of rules. It takes a school-wide effort to create a positive classroom environment (Mellish, 2017).

Your classroom arrangement is the physical foundation of where your students will learn. This means that every square foot of it needs to be used for activities that support learning. The spatial structure of the classroom; where students will be seated, how the students will move about the classroom, and the whole classroom atmosphere needs to be considered, as well as how the classroom will be structured to address the academic, social, and emotional needs of the students. The physical arrangement of the classroom should also be reflective of the student body and must be consistent with the needs of all learners. In addition to the way your classroom is physically arranged, the classroom environment as a whole need to be considered. What you put on your walls, the classroom materials you will use, and where, and how you will set up your activities. All attributes of a structured learning environment need to be considered when setting up your classroom (Cox, 2018).

Emphasizing the point made above, Robert et al (2018) submit that: “Effective teaching and learning cannot take place in a poorly managed classroom. If students are disorderly and disrespectful, and no apparent rules and procedures guide behavior, chaos becomes the norm. In these situations, both teachers and students suffer. Teachers struggle to teach, and students most likely learn much less than they should. In contrast, well-managed classrooms provide an environment in which teaching and learning can flourish. But a well-managed classroom doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It takes a good deal of effort to create—and the person who is most responsible for creating it is the teacher.”

Although the effect the classroom teacher can have on student achievement is clear, the dynamics of how a teacher produces such an effect are not simple. Rather, the effective teacher performs many functions. These functions can be organized into three major roles: (1) making wise choices about the most effective instructional strategies to employ, (2) designing classroom curriculum to facilitate student learning, and (3) making effective use of classroom management techniques (Robert et al, 2018).

The first role deals with instructional strategies and their use. Effective teachers have a wide array of instructional strategies at their disposal. They are skilled in the use of cooperative learning and graphic organizers; they know how best to use homework and how to use questions and advance organizers, and so on. Additionally, they know when these strategies should be used with specific students and specific content. Although cooperative learning might be highly effective in one lesson, a different approach might be better in another lesson (Robert et al, 2018).

According to a recent study at the University of Salford, a well-designed classroom can boost student performance by 25 percent. That means that your classroom design can have a significant impact on your students’ performance. So, it is essential to thoughtfully and clearly consider all facets of your classroom design. A well-thought-out physical arrangement of your classroom is also important for these reasons: students will learn which behaviors are acceptable and expected in each specific location in the classroom. For example, when in the classroom library, students need to be quiet, but while in the classroom play area, students are allowed to talk. Further, students will learn to anticipate which activities will occur in specific areas of the classroom. This helps students be mindful of how they need to behave for each specific area they are in (Cox, 2018).

Although the characteristics of an effective classroom manager are clear and even somewhat intuitively obvious, what might not be as clear or obvious is how you become an effective classroom manager. You might ask the question, Are effective classroom managers born, or can you become one if you are not one already? Fortunately, the answer to this question is that effective classroom managers are made. Good classroom managers are teachers who understand and use specific techniques. Awareness of and training in these techniques can change teacher behavior, which in turn changes student behavior and ultimately affects student achievement positively. One of the most promising findings from the research on becoming a skilled classroom manager is that apparently it can happen relatively quickly. For example, in their study of some 40 junior high school teachers randomly assigned to experimental and control groups, Emmer, Sanford, Clements, and Martin (1982) found that teachers’ skills at classroom management could be significantly improved even by the simple intervention of providing them with a manual and two half-day work-shops (Robert et al, 2018).

In conclusion, Robert et al in their research opine that “that classes that use disciplinary interventions will have their good days and bad days, as will classes that don’t. However, the average number of disruptions in classes that use disciplinary interventions effectively is substantially fewer than in classes that don’t. Over a year’s time, this decreases in disruptive behavior results in a significantly different atmosphere in the two types of classes. Over a year’s time, classes that employ disciplinary interventions will have about 980 disruptions, whereas classes that do not will have about 1,800.”