Giving Teaching Back to Teachers by Robin Barrow

Author:Robin Barrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-41214-4
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

1. CLASSROOM DISCIPLINE

I shall begin by looking in some detail at the research undertaken, over a period of years and in slightly different contexts, by Kounin and his associates (1958, 1966, 1970) into classroom control and pupil deviancy. I have selected this for attention first because Dunkin and Biddle, who are quite willing to be critical when they see occasion to be, regard it as a ‘strikingly original program’. ‘We suspect that Kounin’s research holds considerable promise for the eventual improvement of classroom teaching,’ they write: and they add that they ‘regard these findings as impressive’.8 We should expect, then, some pretty reliable data about the correlation between certain aspects of class management and certain pupil behaviours.

‘It seems to us’, write Dunkin and Biddle, ‘that adequate management of the classroom environment also forms a necessary condition for cognitive learnings.’9 It seems so to me as well, but that is hardly illuminating, being a matter of what is meant by ‘adequate management’. By definition, given that classrooms are essentially concerned with promoting cognitive learning, management that fails to promote it is inadequate! Conversely, that which successfully promotes it is thereby shown to be adequate, at least in that respect. It ceases to be a matter of definition if one is more specific and says, for example, ‘What I count as adequate management includes keeping children quiet’. But in that case it is not reasonable to assert that adequate management seems a necessary condition for cognitive learnings, for it has not been shown that keeping children quiet is a necessary condition of enabling them to learn. Clearly what we need to know, to make this observation significant, is what kind of classroom management is adequate to promote cognitive learning. But as to that, Dunkin and Biddle themselves say that of the three central traditions of research in this area that they review, the findings of one in relation to process-product are weak, the second (which is represented by Kounin) does not deal with product or student achievement, and the third consists of ‘experiments’ that ‘are largely flawed’.10 From which an impartial judge might be inclined to deduce that we are left with the truism that we want adequate rather than inadequate management, but that unfortunately research has not revealed what constitutes adequate management.

Before summarising the research it is necessary to point out that the typical manner of writing up research, standing at one remove, even in the calm and non-persuasive manner of Dunkin and Biddle, may be misleading. Although they are meticulous throughout their book in stating that cause and effect cannot be observed and is a matter of inference, the ‘findings’ they cite as impressive turn out to be assumptions about what the teacher ‘should’ do to gain certain effects, and not simply the recorded correlations. They claim further that the research shows that certain things, such as the clarity and firmness of the teacher’s response to deviant behaviour, are ‘simply unrelated’ to success at control, and that ‘we learn that desist clarity induced greater conformity among deviantly linked audience pupils’.

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