changes in their classroom instruction would enhance their effectiveness and asked for recommendations on what to change, but the supervisors had only limited knowledge of research-based effective instructional practices. Interestingly, in many cases, the teachers were much more knowledgeable regarding effective teaching strategies than those conducting the observation!
Fortunately, the latter part of the 1970s witnessed an increased interest within both the U.S. Department of Education and the research community in pursuing research around teaching effectiveness. And fortunately for me, like so many times in my life, I serendipitously met a person who would make a significant impact on my professional career and greatly enhance my knowledge of and thinking about instructional improvement—a meeting I’ll describe in the next chapter. But it’s safe to say that without my prior decades of experience with classroom observation through the clinical supervision process and the friendship and mentorship of Jerry Bellon, this new research wouldn’t have had nearly the impact on me that it ultimately did.
CHAPTER 2
The Consumer-Validation Approach
Research Into Practice
The clinical supervision framework continued to be the focus of my thinking about instructional improvement well into the mid-1970s. In the fall of 1972, I joined the faculty at Middle Tennessee State University. I was sure I would stay at the university for four or five years and then move to a larger university. Instead, I remained for the next forty-one years!
There were many reasons. Some were personal. We were settled in the Murfreesboro community, and our extended family was in nearby Chattanooga. Other reasons were professional. I eventually worked for five university presidents, all of whom treated me wonderfully. From the time I joined the faculty until I became dean of the College of Education, I was mentored by Ralph White, chair of the Department of Educational Leadership. More than a mentor, Ralph became a great friend. And importantly, each dean, vice president, and president not only allowed me to continue my consulting work with K–12 schools but also encouraged me to do so. Although in subsequent years I had opportunities to move to the University of Georgia and the University of Virginia, both of which I seriously considered, in the end, I realized I could not find another university culture as supportive as Middle Tennessee State.
In the early 1970s—along with Peabody College, Tennessee State University, and the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools—Middle Tennessee State joined a consortium, the Teacher Education Alliance for Metro, to supervise and develop preservice teachers and provide in-service opportunities for educators. When I joined the university faculty, my initial assignment was with the consortium. During my second year on the faculty, I was joined by my good friend and colleague Jim Huffman, who had also received his doctorate from the University of Tennessee. Working daily in Nashville’s schools gave us the opportunity to expand our public school experiences, particularly in inner-city schools, even though we were full-time university faculty. Although the consortium was our primary responsibility, we were also assigned to teach graduate classes.
The combination of working in schools within a large metropolitan district, consulting in suburban districts in Chicago and Long Island, and teaching graduate classes composed primarily of teachers from surrounding suburban and rural districts in Tennessee provided a perfect laboratory for our interest in research-based instructional improvement.
As a university faculty member, my interest in the research on effective teaching practices became more focused. I learned of efforts by the U.S. Department of Education and the educational research community, particularly at Michigan State University and the University of Texas, to improve student achievement through research to identify specific teaching behaviors that directly affected student learning and behavior—what was at the time referred to as the teacher effects research. One of the researchers who had an early impact on our thinking was Jacob S. Kounin (1970).
The Kounin Research on Classroom Management
The work of Kounin (1970) was groundbreaking in two ways: one, it impacted the way both researchers and practitioners viewed classroom management, and two, it fueled the emerging interest among researchers in objectively observing classroom instruction and its effect on student learning and behavior.
Kounin’s (1970) interest in classroom management began quite accidentally. During one of his classes, he reprimanded a student for reading a newspaper during the lesson. He noticed that although he had reprimanded only one student, his reprimand had an effect on other students in the class. He later asked, “Why were students who weren’t targets of the reprimand affected by it? Do differences in the qualities of the reprimand produce different effects, if any, on non-target students?” (Kounin, 1970, p. iii).
Kounin’s curiosity eventually led to years of research on the subject of classroom discipline—specifically, the effects of how teachers handle student misbehavior. He sought to discover if some discipline techniques are more effective than others when it comes to affecting the behavior of an entire class. He also wanted to learn if and how the discipline techniques of teachers who are perceived as good disciplinarians differ from the techniques of those who are perceived as weak disciplinarians (Eaker & Keating, 2015).
After five years of study, Kounin did not find many, if any, differences in the effects of various disciplinary techniques on the larger classroom environment. He found that the manner in which teachers handled misbehavior made no difference in how audience students reacted. He was unable to predict any ripple effect from the quality of a disciplinary event. Further, he found that a teacher’s actions after a student misbehaves (desist techniques) “are not significant determinants of managerial success in classrooms” (Kounin, 1970, p. 71).
Kounin was not deterred. He sought to know why some teachers are generally viewed as better disciplinarians than others. What differentiates good disciplinarians from weak disciplinarians? To answer this question, he began another research project. This second study differed in that Kounin and his colleagues collected data from videotapes. The use of videotapes allowed the researchers to gather data about the larger issues related to how teachers manage their classrooms, rather than only data focusing on the more specific issue of how teachers respond to misbehavior (Eaker & Keating, 2015). Kounin and his researchers were able to analytically review teacher and student behavior in real classrooms without relying on classroom observations in real time.
The findings in this second study were significant. Kounin and his colleagues found that how teachers managed their lessons prior to student misbehavior had a far more powerful effect on student behavior than teachers’ disciplinary actions after student misbehavior occurred. In other words, what teachers were doing prior to misbehavior to manage the whole classroom was more significant than how they dealt with individual incidents.
Kounin (1970) was able to group various classroom management behaviors into four categories.
1. Withitness and overlapping: Kounin (1970) defines teacher withitness as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by simple verbal announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head’” (p. 82). Associated with withitness is overlap: “what the teacher does when she has two matters to deal with at the same time. Does she somehow attend to both issues simultaneously, or does she remain or become immersed in one issue only, to the neglect of the other?” (p. 85).
2. Smoothness and momentum: Kounin and his colleagues found that effectively managing instructional and noninstructional transitions and movement reduced student misbehavior:
A
