Q&A: Boosting Classroom Management Skills May Curb Teacher Attrition

Great teaching is not the result of an inherent talent. Instead, effective teachers develop a specific set of skills over time, the quality of those skills playing a key role in the academic success of students, according to Brendan Bartanen, assistant professor at the UVA School of Education and Human Development.

“A long-standing body of research demonstrates that students who have more effective teachers learn more over the school year and this learning translates into better life outcomes,” said Bartanen, a research at EdPolicyWorks, a research center in partnership with the Education School and the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. “What we are still learning about as researchers is how specific skills may play outsized roles in driving student learning.”

In his new study, Bartanen zeros in on the impact classroom management skills have on early career teachers and why that skill is critical to keeping novice teachers in the profession. 

We sat down with him to learn more.

Q. What is so significant about classroom management?

An orderly and respectful classroom environment is non-negotiable in that meaningful learning cannot occur if there are constant disruptions, distractions, or misbehavior. That doesn’t mean that students should always be silent, sitting at their desks, and tracking the teacher with their eyes (this is often what comes to mind when folks think about a well-managed classroom). Effective classroom management is about clearly setting expectations for students, establishing consistent and efficient routines (e.g., how to transition between activities or classrooms), and dealing with misbehavior firmly but fairly.

Classroom management is also critical because it affects all students in the classroom, even when issues may be driven by just one or a handful of students. All students suffer when teachers fail to maintain an orderly and respectful classroom environment. 

Q. How can higher levels of classroom management skills impact teacher shortages?

One important thing we find in this paper is that novice teachers who struggle with classroom management are more likely to leave the profession. That’s notable for a couple of reasons. 

First, novice teachers are more likely to work in schools that are “hard-to-staff," meaning that they are filling teaching positions that may otherwise be vacant. To the extent that novice teachers in these environments are ill-equipped to manage their classroom, there can be a constant churn of teachers that is harmful to student learning. In the worst cases, schools are unable to fill vacancies with full-time teachers. 

Second, schools that experience challenges filling vacancies may also be those where student misbehavior is more prevalent or where classroom management is a more vital skill. 

Improving novice teachers’ classroom management skills—particularly during the teacher preparation phase—is likely to lower attrition among novice teachers and, by extension, ameliorate teacher shortages. 

Q. What does your research reveal about teachers’ skill development?

This paper provides solid empirical evidence about the specific skills that novice teachers improve over their early career. 

We’ve known for a long time that in terms of overall effectiveness (e.g., how much they improve student test scores), teachers improve quite substantially on average, over their first five years, but research was unable to pinpoint the specific drivers of this overall improvement. 

This paper is significant in that it actually speaks to why novice teachers improve. We find that overall improvement is driven by skill-building in two areas: classroom management and presenting content. These are “fundamental” teaching skills that allow a teacher to reach at least a baseline level of effectiveness. 

Once you’ve mastered or become competent in fundamental skills, you can then move on to improving more difficult skills, such as how to effectively solicit and respond to student questions, or engaging students in higher-order thinking activities. 

Q. How does this work relate to teacher preparation programs?

A key implication of our work is that teacher preparation programs need to focus more heavily on practical skills like classroom management. 

In doing some of the background literature review and talking to a variety of folks in the teacher preparation realm, it was shocking how little attention some programs pay to classroom management, in particular. 

A large amount of coursework is devoted to more theoretical concepts or, even when dealing with classroom management, provides insufficient opportunities for students to actually apply what they are learning. This is one reason why the clinical teaching (also called student teaching) experience is so important. However, a single semester teaching in someone else’s classroom (where you are not primarily responsible for establishing classroom routines or responding to misbehavior) may not be sufficient for some teachers to develop adequate classroom management skills. 

Innovative approaches that regularly put students “in the moment” to respond to a disruptive student, for example, could be quite useful for building these skills.