When control isn't enough.
The assumptions driving the Engaged Classrooms initiative.
Effective classroom management is more than quick-fix strategies or a bag of tricks. It is a purposeful philosophical, ethical and theoretical code of conduct - Tim McDonald
Listen to the podcast segment of Ideology in Education (at 10:55) based on this blog post for the Teacher’s Education Review below 👇.
Amidst fears surrounding the state of student behaviour in Australian schools, the federal Education Minister Jason Clare recently announced the Engaged Classrooms initiative to support teachers in minimising disruptions within the classroom. The government has committed to investing $3.5 million over the next two years to support the appointed expert Dr Tim McDonald and the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) in providing professional learning resources for teachers in relation to managing student behaviour in the classroom.
Clare (2023, para. 8) states that the initiative will provide:
easily accessible evidence guides
adaptable best practice templates
video demonstrations and written case studies
online and face-to-face training materials (including targeted training for schools; materials for school leaders for running their own in-school professional learning; materials for initial teacher education).
Though it is encouraging to see the current federal Education Minister making efforts to support teachers in the difficult work of navigating the complex relational and political dynamics of the classroom, this initiative is not without its problems. For example, McDonald (2010) seems to make it clear that classroom management involves a deeper engagement in the ethical, philosophical and theoretical aspects of teaching than simply the application of “best practice” techniques. It feels a bit strange to see his named tied to such a policy initiative, which (at least at face value) sidesteps these important considerations. Secondly, it seems to me fairly nonsensical for money to be poured into this project over such a lengthy period of time when AERO already has resources on classroom management freely available on their website.
That being said, in this post I wanted to address one of the core assumptions driving the Engaged Classrooms initiative. That is the idea that classroom management (or control) is synonymous with student engagement. It is my argument that student engagement cannot be seen as totally dependent on classroom management, that there may be experiences where a teacher’s control of classroom disruptions is insufficient in securing student engagement. It is at this point, when control is not enough, that teachers will need to look beyond classroom management techniques to other means of developing engagement in their students.
Control and engagement.
The assumption that classroom management is synonymous with student engagement is evident in the framing of this initiative. Clare’s (2023, para. 1) media release begins by claiming that the project ‘will develop tools to support teachers in effectively managing classrooms’ but only a few statements later advises that the ‘$3.5 million project will use the latest evidence to help guide teachers to deliver routines, strategies and approaches that maximise student engagement in their classrooms’ (ibid., para. 4, emphasis added). Furthermore, the CEO of AERO, Dr Jenny Donovan, is quoted in the media release as claiming:
“We know that maximising students’ learning time in class is critical for them to effectively learn, and that this can only happen if teachers can minimise disruptive behaviour and disengagement” (Clare, 2023, para. 10, emphasis added).
As I have written about previously, we should be wary of statements that begin with “we know that”, which aim to appeal to a certain kind of “common sense”. But I digress.
There is evidence here to suggest that the crux of this initiative is grounded within the belief that student engagement is simply a matter of teacher control.
In some cases, we might agree with such a statement. But what about when control isn’t enough?
When control isn’t enough.
It is here that I will share a short anecdote of a recent interaction I had with one of my Mathematics classes, to highlight the problem of attributing student engagement entirely in terms of teacher classroom management.
It was during an everyday Mathematics class, when a student piped up and asked the question I wish I received a dollar for every time I heard it:
“Sir, when are we ever going to use this in real life?”
If you’re a Mathematics teacher, you will know this experience all too well.
This is a valid question, one I believe deserves some considerate response to. However, as the student asking the question might have been considered one of the more disruptive of my students, I utilised some classroom management techniques to steer the student towards the task at hand.
Until the next student piped up and wanted an answer to the same question.
And the next.
All of a sudden, I could sense a change in the atmosphere where it was clear that these students genuinely needed a response to this question to become truly engaged in the Mathematics we were exploring in class. It was not enough for me to simply keep the class “in line” with behaviour management strategies anymore.
So, I considered how I might address this concern with this specific class. I emailed the student’s parents encouraging them to have a conversation with their children about what they believed the purpose of learning Mathematics in secondary school is. I followed this up with a short conversation with the class providing one potential answer to the question, one I believed to be valuable for the students to hear (I won’t bore with the details of this, but if you’re interested in the justification I gave feel free to get in touch with me directly!).
It would be naive of me to assume that these small gestures are entirely responsible for the change in engagement that I have noticed in the class since. However, the point of sharing this story was to highlight the limitations of seeing engagement as entirely a matter of classroom management.
Sometimes control just isn’t enough.
Beyond control.
In the current climate, much of Australian educational policy seems geared towards control. The ideological perspectives that see control as desirable have come to define much of how teachers can act within their profession, something I have also written a little about.
However, as I have tried to highlight with a rather everyday teaching experience, there is a need for teachers, schools and policymakers to consider engagement more wholistically than simply a matter of classroom management.
The problem is that when engagement is framed as synonymous with classroom management the teacher is made ultimately responsible for any engagement, or lack thereof, in their students. Obscuring structural blockages to student engagement (education policy, school funding, school stratification, externally determined curriculum, etc.), not to mention the inherent freedom of our students to disobey, places the teacher as solely accountable to student engagement and hence, learning outcomes.
This is an unfair burden for teachers to bear entirely.
Let’s make it clear that classroom management is not the final answer to student engagement.
It may be time to look beyond control.
Till next time,
References
Clare, J. (2023). More support for teachers to manage the classroom. Ministers’ Media Centre. Retrieved from https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/more-support-teachers-manage-classroom.
McDonald, T. (2019). Classroom management ebook : Engaging students in learning. Oxford University Press.
Thanks Tom another insightful piece. Years ago in a poor working class West Heidelberg school, near that great bastion of truth which is La Trobe Uni, I was having a lot of trouble with Y8 & Y9's. It was the first time I encountered that all too common phrase these days "evidence based". Bill Rogers was the evidenced based behaviour guru back then & maybe still is? Anyway, I was desperate, so decided to read the "evidence" - a couple books plus VHS tapes and two weeks later I learnt all of his strategies. Then 4 weeks of implementation of those strategies - NOTHING worked! In the end I just did the best I could, trying to make maths lessons interesting and engaging as i could. The thing that came closest to working for the whole class (but not always) was our Maths Task center of around 300 hands-on problems. One of the teachers had organised a room and a sequence for every Y7-9 student to work through -1period/week, over the 3 years - Records were kept. This was the closest to class room management and engagement that I got to at that school.
Wonderful! In fact 'control' is regarded as anathema to engagement in the Self Determination theory, my favourite theory for understanding motivation. Researchers have shown that teachers have a natural tendency towards, and preference for, control, especially when stressed, and it is that attempt at control that actually makes engagement harder.