Michele Thelen

529

TTE

Student and Teacher Perspectives on Classroom Management

by
Anita Woolfolk Hoy, Carol S. Weinstein
The purpose of this article is to look at the differing beliefs that students and teachers have about what it takes to be an
effective classroom manager. In conclusion, Woolfolk Hoy and Weinstein contrast the beliefs of these classroom
participants and consider implications for classroom practices. They end with implications for future research.
I.

II.

III.

There are general assumptions that are made in regards to effective classroom managers.
a. Both teachers and students have strong opinions about what it takes to be an effective manager.
b. Understanding both perspectives is important in building good learning environments.
c. For this article authors focused on classroom management research meaning actions taken to create a
productive, orderly learning environment.
Defining knowledge, beliefs, and perceptions: It is important to clarify the definitions of the following terms.
a. Knowledge and beliefs can be viewed as overlapping constructs.
b. Knowledge: can be seen as more factual and verifiable.
c. Beliefs: tend to be subjective and do not require validation. (Research on teachers focused mainly on
knowledge and beliefs.)
d. Perceptions: also an overlapping construct. Student perceptions are thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about
persons, situations and events.
Students Perceptions of Classroom Management: Research shows that students are not passive recipients of
teacher actions. They chose to resist or comply; make decisions to ignore, avoid, sabotage, question teachers
requests. Students actions are purposive based on their interpretations of school and classroom life and their
relationships with teachers.
a. There are three factors that are central to students perceptions of good teachers.
i. Teachers should have the ability to establish caring relationships with students.
1. Studies show the importance that students place on teachers willingness to be there for
them, to listen and to show concern for students personal and academic lives.
2. Studies repeatedly emphasize the importance of personal caring and academic caring.
3. Students need to feel cared for before they could care about school.
ii. Teachers should have the ability to exercise authority without being rigid, threatening or
punitive.
1. Studies show that good teachers (in students opinions) are able to maintain order,
provide limits for behavior, and create an environment in which students feel safe.
2. Students feel more positively about their classes when teachers are seen as both
cooperative -caring, helpful, friendly, and supportive- and dominant -showing
leadership, being influential, and acting in an authoritative manner.
3. Students distinguish between teachers who are strict and those who are mean. They
respect teachers who have rules, but not overly rigid, and dont set themselves above
and apart.
iii. Teachers should have the ability to make learning fun
1. Studies show students appreciate a teacher who has the ability to develop and implement
engaging, varied lessons.
2. Students want teachers to use more interactive, participatory strategies and to structure
lessons to meet students interests and needs.
3. Students prefer group work and cooperative activities and praise teachers who combine
humor, enthusiasm, and creativity in their lessons.
b. There are three areas focused on students perceptions of disciplinary interventions.
1

Michele Thelen
529

IV.

TTE

i. Research has focused on coercive versus less directive strategies.

1. Researchers speculate that teachers use of relationship strategies (rewards and
recognitions, discussions, involvement and nondirective hints) promoted greater levels of
student responsibility.
2. Fearing the consequences of misbehavior will not necessarily lead students to comply
with rules. In one study coercive policies appeared to be ineffective.
ii. Research has also focused on severity and acceptability of disciplinary interventions.
1. It is important for teachers to be able to achieve order without resorting to shaming a
student or public humiliation.
2. Students viewed permanent suspension and shaming or personally insulting a student
as severe sanctions.
3. Public reprimands of the individual and negative consequences for the group when only
one child misbehaved are judged to be unacceptable interventions.
4. More acceptable consequence is sending to principals office, point system, staying in
during recess and quiet room.
5. When teachers embarrass, insult, or demean students publicly, they may engender
sympathy for the misbehaving students and disturb the others.
iii. Research has also focused on students perceptions of differential treatment, justice, and fairness.
1. Students discern that high expectations, trust, and opportunity from teachers are linked
with doing well in school, whereas scolding, monitoring, and lots of help are associated
with poor performance.
2. Differential treatment because of racism or classism is clearly unacceptable to students.
3. One study suggests that differentiated behavioral interventions because of special needs
may be considered appropriate.
4. Most students were in favor of behavioral adaptations when needed.
5. Some researchers concluded that teachers may be more concerned about equal treatment
of students than students are.
In the last two decades much research has been focused on teachers knowledge and beliefs about classroom
management. Teachers prior experiences influence their teaching and classroom management. Prospective
teachers come to college experts in being schooled; implicit models of what it means to teach, manage, and
learn are inferred from thousands hours of schooling. Formal teacher education courses are seen as the least
powerful influence on teachers beliefs. Teachers beliefs lead to teachers actions that impact students
learning. It was also noted that teachers beliefs about teaching and management are not always consistent.
a. Research has looked at orientations to management. Most successful teachers view class management as
the creation of effective, engaging, supportive learning environments and the socialization of students,
whereas less successful teachers see management as discipline and the maintenance of authority.
i. Research has studied custodial and humanistic control orientations.
1. Custodial perspective is the traditional school that provides an inflexible and highly
regimented setting concerned primarily with the maintenance of order.
a. Students stereotyped by appearance, behavior, and family social status.
b. School as autocratic organization with rigid pupil-teacher status hierarchy
c. Students must accept orders from teachers without question.
d. Teachers do not attempt to understand misbehavior but instead view it as a
personal affront.
e. Impersonality, pessimism, punishment, and watchful mistrust pervade the
atmosphere.
2. Humanistic perspective is the school regarded as an educational community in which
students learn through cooperative interaction and experience.
a. Learning and behavior are viewed in psychological and sociological terms.
2

Michele Thelen
529

TTE

ii.

iii.
iv.

v.

vi.

b. Self-discipline is substituted for strict teacher control.

c. Teachers desire a democratic atmosphere with open channels of two-way
communication.
d. Stresses the importance of each student and the creation of a climate to meet the
wide range of student needs.
3. Teachers who have a more custodial orientation tend to be more external in their locus of
control, more authoritative and dogmatic in their beliefs, more likely to support corporal
punishment, more directive, and less progressive in their educational attitudes.
4. Teachers who favor a whole language approach to reading tend to be more humanistic
whereas those favoring a phonics approach are more custodial.
5. Greater teacher custodialism is significantly related to teacher stress and burnout.
There are three philosophical orientations about discipline inventory.
1. Relationship-listening is humanism. Child is viewed as inherently good. Teachers task
in responding to disruptive behaviors is to help students negotiate their own goals in
relation to the needs of others in the class and the requirements of the curriculum.
2. Confronting-contracting is consistent with a social learning perspective. The emphasis is
on interacting with students to establish shared goals and standards.
3. Rules-consequences is sometimes called interventionist. Good behavior is the result of
learning through experiencing consequences (rewards and punishments). The teacher
decides what behavior is needed and assertively teaches, monitors, and provides
consequences- rewarding or punishing behaviors as appropriate.
Teachers beliefs about classroom management tend to be influenced by individual and contextual
differences.
In regards to management as power, there are four orientations to discipline.
1. Traditional: Much in common with custodial ideology and the rules-consequences
philosophy. Tough but fair.
2. Liberal progressive: Democratic principles should apply in all social situations. Students
should share power and be part of decision making.
3. Socially critical: Student disruption seen as resistance against unfair or repressive
practices of schools.
4. Laissez-faire: Researchers found no teachers who embraced this stance.
5. Few teachers actually adhered to only one type. Most teachers hold beliefs from several
orientations, depending on the situations.
Two key aspects of the teacher role are instruction and socialization.
1. Elementary teachers have more opportunities to act as socializers since they see the same
20-30 students at work and play all year long.
2. High school teachers tend to be more subject matter specialists.
3. Research shows that having some aspects of the socializer role seems to prevent behavior
problems.
4. Research shows there are more behavior problems in schools where teachers immediately
refer problem students to administrators and take little responsibility for helping students
improve their behaviors.
Teachers view of management can range from controlling to supporting autonomy.
1. Teachers who decide on a solution to classroom problems and then use rewards or
sanctions to make sure the solutions are implemented have a highly controlling
orientation.
2. On the other end of the continuum are teachers who encourage students to arrive at a
solution themselves which is highly supportive of autonomy. These teachers are
socializing students to be independent and self-regulating.
3

Michele Thelen
529

TTE

3. Controlling teachers seek student compliance and set sanctions to ensure compliance,
whereas autonomy-supporting teachers seek student initiative and input.
vii. The choices teachers allow students to make is associated with positive student outcomes.
1. Studies of self-regulation, student self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation suggest that
students sense of having control in the classroom (having and making choices) is
associated with positive student outcomes, such as engagement and learning.
2. The main conclusion from the research is that choice positively effects affect but has little
impact on performance.
3. Students will become more self-determining and self-regulating when they are allowed to
work cooperatively and encouraged to attribute success to effort and when they are
engaged in activity-based tasks that pique their interests and enable them to make
choices within the boundaries set by the teachers.
b. One research focus is on perceived value of different management strategies. Positive interventions
(praise, tokens, rewards, etc) are seen as more acceptable than negative (time out, loss of privileges, etc).
The more severe the childs problem, the more acceptable is the intervention. Punishment and controloriented strategies are seen as appropriate for hostile-aggressive, disruptive and defiant students whereas
sympathetic, help-oriented strategies were suggested for shy, anxious, rejected, or low-achieving students.
c. There can be various reasons and attributions for student misbehavior.
i. Attributions are explanations given for successes and failures - assumed causes.
1. Characterized in terms of three dimensions:
a. Locus (location of the cause internal or external to the person)
b. Stability (whether the cause stays the same or can change)
c. Controllability (whether the person can control the cause)
2. When teachers assume that student failure is attributable to forces beyond the students
control, they tend to respond with sympathy and to avoid giving punishments.
3. If the failures are attributed to a controllable factor, such as lack of effort, the teachers
response is more likely to be anger; retribution and punishment may follow.
ii. Teachers reactions to and beliefs about the student behavior depends on problem ownership.
1. If the students behavior has a serious effect on the teacher, then the teacher owns the
problem. Examples are defiant students and students who fail due to lack of effort.
a. Some teachers view as intentional
b. Teachers pessimistic about making stable improvements
c. Teachers rely on demands and punishment threats.
2. If the teacher is concerned by the students behavior because it is getting in the students
way, then it is the students problem. Examples are struggling, low-achieving students or
highly anxious students who put forth good effort, but still have trouble learning.
a. Teachers more confident they could help student change.
b. Teachers view students as victims of outside forces.
c. Responses include support and engagement with student.
d. Teacher efficacy defined as the extent to which the teacher believes he or she has the capacity to affect
student performance.
i. Sense of efficacy is directly related to classroom management.
1. Efficacy consistently related to student achievement.
2. High efficacy related to willingness to implement innovations, decreased teacher stress,
less negative affect in teaching and teachers willingness to stay in the field.
3. Strong sense of efficacy can support higher motivation, greater effort, persistence and
resilience across the span of a teaching career.
4. Efficacy beliefs resistant to change.
ii. Researchers attempt to measure teacher efficacy.
4

Michele Thelen
529

V.

TTE

1. Efficacy is situation and task specific.

2. Teachers efficacy judgments are the result of the interaction between a personal appraisal
of the relative importance of factors that make teaching difficult and an assessment of
self-perceptions of personal teaching capabilities.
iii. Novice teachers frequently have unrealistic optimism that can interfere with their ability to
accurately judge their own effectiveness.
1. Student teachers who had trouble managing their classes still reported high levels of
classroom management efficacy.
2. Novice teachers tend to think of caring and order in mutually exclusive terms.
3. Research shows that teachers need to understand the ways that positive interpersonal
relationships and engaging, well-orchestrated lessons contribute to order.
4. Teachers need to appreciate that caring can be enacted by teaching well and by creating
safe, orderly classrooms.
Conclusions
a. There are convergences and divergences between teacher and student beliefs.
i. There are differences in concerns and focus between students and teachers.
1. Students focus on personal and relational dimensions. They believe that good teachers
care.
2. Teachers are more focused on order and academic concerns. Compliance is common
goal for disciplinary interventions.
ii. There are differences in desired relationships between students and teachers.
1. Students seek choices in their schoolwork and respect, affection, trust, a listening ear,
patience and humor in their relationships with teachers.
2. Students look for teachers who are caring yet provide limits, who have high behavioral
and academic expectations.
3. Teachers look for respect for authority (particularly their authority), cooperation, and
compliance with school and classroom rules and procedures.
iii. There are differences in individual and developmental needs.
1. Students indicate a desire for caring teachers and particularly value personal caring.
2. Teachers are more likely to ignore personal relations and focus on improving behavior
and academic performance. Teachers may communicate more caring to successful
students.
iv. There are key distinctions in students and teachers views.
1. Students respect teachers who set fair rules, use humor and a light touch to get students
back on track and who do not publicly reprimand or embarrass them.
2. Students accept that to be fair and supportive sometimes teachers must treat students
differently.
3. Teachers make important distinctions between the causes and intentions of student
behaviors.
4. When teachers assume that students misbehavior is attributable to forces beyond the
students control, they tend to respond with sympathy and to avoid giving punishments.
5. If the failures are attributed to a controllable factor, such as lack of effort, the teachers
response is more likely to be anger, retribution, and punishment.
v. What is good classroom management?
1. Students require a fair and reasonable system of classroom rules and procedures that
protect and respect students.
2. Students value choices and chances for responsibilities. They do not want to feel coerced
or controlled.
5

Michele Thelen
529

TTE

3. Teachers believe students need to earn their respect, relationship, concern and interest.
Choices and autonomy support come with successful self-regulation.
4. Problem with these contrasting views is the possibility of downward spiral of mistrust.
a. Students withhold cooperation until teachers earn it with their authentic caring.
b. Teachers withhold caring until students earn it with respect for authority and
cooperation.
vi. There are key implications for practice.
1. Research demonstrates link between positive student-teacher relationships and students
motivation to become engaged with academic activities.
2. There is an inseparable relationship between classroom management and instruction.
3. Lessons should encourage students active participation and address their interests, needs
and backgrounds.
vii. There are implications for future research.
1. The goal of classroom management is to create an environment in which students behave
appropriately, not out of fear of punishment or desire for reward, but out of a sense of
personal responsibility, respect, and regard for the group.
2. There is a need for systematic inquiry into how teachers establish and maintain positive,
caring relationships with students, foster autonomy and self-regulation, and build
community.