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Kounin's Classroom Management Research

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Evidence · 2 claims (2 for) · 1 study (1 associational), q3 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description

Where the humanist tradition (Ginott, Glasser) and the applied-behavior-analysis tradition are both largely reactive — emphasizing solutions to misbehavior after it occurs — the classroom-management tradition begun by Kounin (1970), and continued by the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Austin (Emmer et al., 1994) and the Institute for Research on Teaching at Michigan State University (Brophy, 1986, 1988), reframed the question of control and warmth in terms of prevention. Its research base observed experienced and inexperienced teachers while they taught, and its major conclusion was that the distinction between more and less effective classroom managers can be made more by what they do to prevent misbehavior than by how they respond to it.

The Emmer, Evertson, and Anderson (1980) study. Twenty-seven third-grade teachers across eight elementary schools were observed for a full year. Based on average student engagement and off-task rates measured after the first three weeks, teachers were classified as more-effective or less-effective managers; the more-effective group sustained significantly higher engagement and significantly less off-task behavior for the rest of the year. Comparing the two groups' classroom-management procedures during those first three weeks — room arrangement, rules, consequences, responses to misbehavior, consistency, monitoring, and reward systems — revealed a clear pattern. More effective managers established themselves as instructional leaders early, working on rules and procedures until students had fully learned them, while also emphasizing group cohesiveness and socialization into shared classroom norms; by the end of three weeks their classes were ready for the rest of the year. Less effective managers, especially first-year teachers, lacked well-worked-out procedures in advance (one new teacher had no procedure at all for the bathroom, pencil sharpener, or water fountain, so children came and went at will); when they did have rules, the rules were often vague ("Be in the right place at the right time") or introduced casually without discussion; and they monitored their classes poorly, often because they withdrew from whole-class surveillance to work at length with one child. Consequences for behavior were also either largely absent or delivered inconsistently — general criticisms that didn't identify a specific offender, repeated unenforced warnings, or vague disciplinary messages ("You're being too noisy"). These deficiencies became recurring "windows of opportunity" for misbehavior, and within a few weeks undesirable behavior patterns and low teacher credibility had become established. Synthesizing this and related studies (Evertson, Emmer, Clements, & Worsham, 1994; Evertson & Emmer, 1982), effective classroom managers show three broad classes of behavior: they devote extensive time before and during the first weeks of school to planning and organizing the classroom; they teach rules and routines as methodically as they teach subject matter, providing clear instructions and monitoring compliance carefully early on; and they inform students of the consequences of breaking rules and enforce those consequences consistently.

Withitness and overlapping. A lot of classroom management is really about keeping activities flowing — but there is never just one thing happening at a time, even during a single planned activity. A common beginning-teacher mistake in these multi-event settings is to attend fully to one activity, student, or group at the expense of noticing and responding to everything else; finishing with a student before attending to a disruption elsewhere in the room, or interrupting yourself to handle it, both cause some disruption. Kounin (1970) named the alternative withitness: attending to multiple events at once, without necessarily giving each equal care — remaining aware of activities, behaviors, and events "in some corner of your mind" even while focused on one of them, colloquially "eyes in the back of your head." Research finds experienced teachers show withitness far more than inexperienced teachers, and that it is associated with managing classrooms successfully (Emmer & Stough, 2001). Withitness in turn makes possible overlapping — nearly simultaneous responses to multiple events that need not take equal time or even be equally noticeable to everyone (a quick glance at a chatting student may barely interrupt an ongoing conversation with someone else, and may not even be noticed by others). The result is a smoother overall flow of activity. Withitness and overlapping develop more easily during familiar routines than during unfamiliar or complex activities, but they improve with practice; merely appearing "withit" — even without actually making overlapping responses — can itself deter off-task behavior, since a student tempted to misbehave may believe the teacher will probably notice regardless.

The ripple effect. Left alone, misbehavior can spread — chatting between two students gradually becomes chatting among six; rudeness by one student becomes rudeness by several — a contagion process Kounin (1970) called the ripple effect. Because of this tendency, delaying a response to inappropriate behavior tends to make the job of getting students back on track harder than responding as immediately as possible, giving prevention-oriented management (rather than purely reactive response) much of its practical urgency.

Implications

Context

Requirements

  • Extensive investment in rule- and routine-teaching during the first weeks of school, methodical enough to match the effort put into teaching subject content
  • Ongoing, divided attention across multiple simultaneous classroom events rather than sustained exclusive focus on any one

Constraints

  • Withitness and overlapping are skills that develop with practice and are harder in unfamiliar or complex activities — a new teacher's difficulty maintaining them in a new topic is not itself a sign of poor management aptitude
  • Prevention-oriented management has comparatively little to offer once a serious disruption is already fully underway and spreading — its value is concentrated in the first weeks of a course and in responding to early, minor signs of misbehavior before the ripple effect takes hold

Target Learners

  • All students benefit from reduced classroom disruption; the tradition's evidence base (Emmer, Evertson, & Anderson, 1980) specifically concerns elementary classrooms, though its principles are widely applied more broadly

Target Learning Objectives

  • Sustained student engagement and minimized off-task behavior across a full school year, achieved primarily through investment during the first few weeks rather than through response after problems emerge

Claims

Examples

Key Sources

  • Kounin, J. S. (1970). Discipline and group management in classrooms. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
  • Emmer, E. T., Evertson, C. M., & Anderson, L. M. (1980). Effective classroom management at the beginning of the school year. The Elementary School Journal, 80(5), 219-231. doi:10.1086/461192
  • Emmer, E. T., Evertson, C. M., Clements, B. S., & Worsham, M. E. (1994). Classroom management for secondary teachers (4th ed.). Allyn & Bacon.
  • Evertson, C. M., & Emmer, E. T. (1982). Effective management at the beginning of the school year in junior high classes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(4), 485-498. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.74.4.485
  • Emmer, E. T., & Stough, L. M. (2001). Classroom management: A critical part of educational psychology, with implications for teacher education. Educational Psychologist, 36(2), 103-112. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep3602_5
  • Arduini-Van Hoose, N. (2020). Systems of classroom management; Preventing management problems; Responding to student misbehavior. In Educational psychology. Retrieved from https://edpsych.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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type theory
title Kounin's Classroom Management Research
description Kounin's tradition of classroom-management research found that the distinction between more and less effective classroom managers lies mainly in what they do to prevent misbehavior — through withitness, overlapping, well-taught rules and routines, and prompt consequences — rather than in how they respond after misbehavior occurs.
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