Ecological Approaches to Classroom Management

1. Ecological Approaches to Classroom Management Walter Doyle University of Arizona

2. Four Sections of the Article • Introduction to the ecological perspective • Types of settings found in classrooms and program of actions that define order for these contexts • Consideration of processes and strategies for managing classroom events • Appraisal of current status and future prospects for an ecological approach

3. Introduction • The central idea surrounding the ecological approach is habitat, the physical niche or context with characteristic purposes, dimensions, features and processes that consequence • The ecological perspective emerged in the 1960s from Kounin and Gump

4. Nature of the Classroom • Multidimensionalityis a large quantity of events and tasks that take place in a classroom • Simultaneity is when many things happen at once in the classroom • Immediacy is a rapid pace of classroom events • Unpredictability in classroom events often take unexpected turns

5. Nature of the Classroom (con’t) • Publicness in classrooms are public places and events, especially those involving the teacher, that are often witnessed by a large portion of the students • History is when classes meet for 5 days a week for several months • There is a common set of experiences, routines and norms which provide a foundation for conducting activities for the rest of the term or year

6. Classroom Management • Order in the classroom is about how order is established and maintained in classroom environments • Order in the classroom does not necessarily mean passivity, absolute silence or rigid conformity to rules • Within acceptable limits, the students are following the program of action for a particular event

7. Classroom Management (con’t) • Classroom management is the actions and strategies used to solve the problem of order in the classroom • Misbehavior is any action by one or more students that: • Threatens to disrupt the activity flow • Pulls the class toward a program of action that threatens the safety of the group • Violates norms of appropriate classroom behavior held by the teacher, the students or the school staff

8. How Life is Organized in the Classroom • A classroom is a behavior setting, an ecobehavioral unit composed of segments that surround and regulate behavior • The basic unit for classroom organization is the activity • Activities with different labels often have quite similar formats

9. How Life is Organized in the Classroom - Involvement • Work involvement or engagement is the most widely used student behavior • Involvement is used to label student behavior that reflects active engagement in working • Noninvolvement or off-task behavior often includes passive withdrawal, mild forms of inappropriate behavior and more serious forms of misbehavior • Involvement was: • Highest for students in teacher-led • Lowest for pupil presentations • Whole class recitations was higher than independent seatwork

10. How Life is Organized in the Classroom - Time • Contexts as programs of action as order is defined by the programs of action embedded in the classroom • Time • Does not just pass in the classroom • It is a rhythmic movement toward accomplishing an academic and/or social goal

11. How Life is Organized in the Classroom - Programs of Action • Recitation requires calling on individual students to give brief answers to public questions before the rest of the class • Seatwork is “supervised study” during which all students are assigned to work independently at their desks • Small groups and cooperative learning teams study together • Transitions are points in social interaction when contexts change

12. How Life is Organized in the Classroom - Pacing • Pacing, Signal Systems and Involvements • Involvement is higher in students who are externally paced (tests, recitation) than a student who is self paced • An emphasis is placed on the activity flow and the pacing of the lesson

13. How Life is Organized in the Classroom – Signal Systems • Continuity: the flow of information or signals to the individual participant • Lessons high in this are teacher presentations • Lessons low in this are group discussions, projects, and role playing • Insulation: degree to which the individual student is isolated from signals for inappropriate behavior • Lessons high in this have low off-task rate • Lessons low in this are music and movement

14. How Order is Achieved in the Classroom – Physical Design of Settings • The physical designs of settings is the compatibility between the program of action in an activity and the physical aspects of the setting • Classroom design and furniture arrangement have little effect on achievement but some effect on attitudes and conduct

15. How Order is Achieved in the Classroom – Establishing Rules and Procedures • Rules are intended to regulate forms of individual conduct that can disrupt activities • Teachers integrate their rules and procedures into a workable system and deliberately teach this system to their students • Effective managers monitored classes closely and stopped inappropriate behavior promptly

16. How Order is Achieved in the Classroom – Misbehavior and Interventions • Misbehavior is any behavior by one or more students that is perceived by the teacher to initiate a vector of action that competes with or threatens the primary vector of action at a particular moment in a classroom activity • Most misbehavior is related to attention, crowd control and getting work accomplished in classrooms

17. How Order is Achieved in the Classroom – Misbehavior and Interventions (con’t) • High-ability students are likely to engage in misbehavior towards the end of an activity. In contrast lower ability students misbehave during the activity • Interventions can repair temporary disturbances in classroom order • Interventions are, by their very nature, reactive

18. Conclusions and Future Research • Classroom management is fundamentally a process of solving the problem of order rather than the problem of disruption or misbehavior • An emphasis on program of action in the classroom is embedded in the activities teachers and students enact together as they accomplish work

19. Conclusions and Future Research (cont’d) • Order in classrooms is context specific and held in place by balancing a large array of forces and processes • Order is a permanent pressure on classroom life and a teacher continuously faces the need to monitor and protect the programs of action in class • Successful classroom management involves understanding the configuration of events in the classroom and skill in monitoring and guiding activities

20. Conclusions and Future Research (cont’d) • Little has been changed in the past two decades • There is a general decline in classroom management research • A challenge is to push the ecological approach toward a framework that integrates habitat, curriculum, action and cognition into a unified conception • Activity theory is a new framework which seems to hold promise for advancing work on an integrated conceptualization for classroom studies through goal-directed, tool-mediated, intersubjective and self-regulated actions