The Naturals Make It Look Easy

How do the natural teachers manage an entire classroom while making it look easy? I decided to hang out in these classrooms until I figured it out. Little did I know that this was the beginning of a new career.

Yogi Berra once said, "You can see a lot by looking." So, I looked. All I saw was kids at work. What does Yogi know about classrooms? I was driven to desperation.

When you watch a natural at work, do not expect to see a big show. Effective management is, for the most part, invisible.

You will certainly not see most of the things we associate with classroom management in our memories of school. You will not see much rule enforcement. You will not hear nagging. You will not see students singled out.

Since effective management is hard to see, we tend to invent a mythology about the skills of these natural teachers. Maybe they are born with it - as though there are genes for classroom management. Maybe it is magic. Who knows?

Making Method Out of Magic

Over a period of two decades, I worked continuously with classroom teachers in every imaginable setting. Whatever they were most concerned with in their classrooms became my research agenda. A succession of natural teachers, excellent graduate students, my wife Jo Lynne, and I spent many an afternoon brainstorming following a day of classroom observation.

We would focus on a problem, and we would experiment until we solved it. Yet, whenever we solved a problem, our teachers would say, "That really helps. But, my main problem now is..." And, off we would go on our next project.

We did our share of formal research and publication, but for every article there were dozens of little experiments that delineated the fine points of practice. We learned more from the natural teachers than we ever taught them. But, over the course of decades we developed a knowledge of classroom management that far exceeded the practices of any single teacher.

Over the years, enough problems were solved to enable us to discern the outlines of the puzzle of classroom management. The puzzle is complex, but it is not overwhelming. This book contains the pieces of that puzzle.