Managing Urban Classrooms: Exploring Beginning Teachers’ Beliefs, Actions, and Influences of Classroom Management.

Abstract

Beginning teachers struggle with classroom management, which is especially problematic for urban schools and other low-achieving, high-poverty environments that employ a disproportionate number of beginning teachers. These teachers tend to enter classrooms unprepared to deal with student misbehavior and tend not to receive adequate support to improve over time. In order to develop beginning teachers as effective classroom managers prior to and within their full-time placement, more needs to be learned about how beginning teachers manage their urban classrooms. This descriptive, mixed method study of one interim certification program explores first year urban teachers’ classroom management experience. I investigate how teachers conceptualize classroom management, what actions they implement to manage the classroom, and who or what they report as helping them to develop in classroom management. Programmatic surveys of 87 first year teachers provide broad trends of teachers’ beliefs, actions, and influences, while interviews, field visits, video recordings, and journals detail five case participants’ experiences throughout the year. Case study analyses indicate that teachers differed in the degree to which they emphasized relational dimensions of classroom management. Relatedly, teachers who reported relational beliefs on their program surveys received higher evaluation ratings as compared to teachers who did not report relational beliefs. This study also indicates that teachers felt they improved most as classroom managers when school and program personnel provided them with specific and timely feedback about alternative methods to manage classrooms, and when they learned from their mistakes during clinical and classroom experience. These findings have implications for teacher preparation and professional development on how to support teachers in managing classrooms. Findings suggest designing teacher education to emphasize a relational approach to classroom management that underscores the importance of establishing a safe environment and using strategies to promote positive interactions in the classroom. These findings also suggest improving how we prepare classroom managers by increasing the frequency that teacher educators observe new teachers and by offering feedback that is more targeted and presents alternative methods of managing classrooms.