A Summing Up. Robert Eaker
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 teacher in a self-contained classroom, then, must initiate, sustain, and terminate many activities. Some of this involves having children move physically from one point of the room to another, as when a group must move from their own desks to the reading circle. At other times it involves some psychological movement, or some change in props, as when children change from doing arithmetic problems at their desks to studying spelling words at the same desks. (Kounin, 1970, p. 92)
There are any number of teacher behaviors that affect smoothness and momentum in classrooms. One such behavior identified by Kounin and his team is stimulus-boundedness—an event in which the teacher:
Behaves as though she has no will of her own and reacts to some unplanned and irrelevant stimulus as an iron filing reacts to some magnet: she gets magnetized and lured into reacting to some minu-tia that pulls her out of the main activity stream. (Kounin, 1970, p. 98)
Another such behavior they identify is dangle. This occurs when “a teacher started, or was in, some activity and then left it ‘hanging in mid-air’ by going off to some other activity. Following such a ‘fade away’ she would then resume the activity” (Kounin, 1970, p. 100). Kounin also found that smoothness and momentum were affected by flip-flops during transitions, when a teacher stops one activity, starts another, then returns to the original activity. Momentum is also affected by slowdowns, and slowdowns are, in turn, affected by such behaviors as over-dwelling and fragmentation. Kounin (1970) defines fragmentation as “a slowdown produced by a teacher’s breaking down an activity into subparts when the activity could have been performed as a single unit” (p. 105).
In short, Kounin found that teachers who exhibit behaviors that contribute to smoothness and momentum have fewer student behavior problems and receive the added benefit of keeping students more involved and focused on their work (Eaker & Keating, 2015).
3. Group alerting and accountability; valence and challenge arousal: Teachers who have fewer student behavior problems can keep the class focused on the lesson using a skill Kounin refers to as group alerting, which is the degree to which teachers are able to involve nonreciting students in the recitation task, maintain their attention, and keep them on their toes or alerted. Kounin also cited an additional dimension of maintaining group focus, formatting, which is what other students are required to do when a person or a small group is being called on to perform or recite (Eaker & Keating, 2015).
Kounin found that misbehavior is decreased when students are motivated to engage in lessons and feel appropriately challenged by classroom activities. He grouped these findings into the category of valence and challenge arousal.
4. Seatwork, variety, and challenge: Closely associated with motivating and challenging students are behaviors related to variety. Teachers who plan for variability in lessons have fewer classroom management problems than teachers who have a limited repertoire of instructional approaches and tend to rely on the same approaches time and again (Eaker & Keating, 2015).
The research of Kounin was seminal for me and, I assume, many others. First, it shifted my professional focus from the clinical supervision process to research-based instructional effectiveness. I did not abandon the idea that observing teachers is important; rather, I found Kounin’s findings provided much-needed support for teachers—especially when linked with classroom observation. I began to see that observers could be armed with a toolbox of proven research strategies they could share with teachers to enhance the likelihood of instructional improvement.
Second, Kounin’s work differed from much of the existing research base in that it was practical, focusing on specific teacher behaviors that practitioners could easily grasp and understand. The findings simply made sense in the real world of schools. Rather than focusing on areas of schooling over which teachers had little or no control—for example, the impact of poverty or the lack of parental support—Kounin’s findings focused on specific things teachers could do or avoid doing to improve their classroom management skills and, thus, improve student behavior.
The work of Kounin was part of a rapidly growing body of research exploring new and exciting prospects for improving what happens in classrooms. My interest in Kounin’s research led me to increasingly focus on the correlation between what teachers do and say in classrooms and student achievement. This led me and Jim Huffman to a new area of interest—again rather accidentally—that would have a significant impact on my professional career.
The Consumer-Validated Research Model
As findings from a growing body of research became available, mainly through journals, newsletters, and meetings, Jim and I began sharing findings from the teacher effects research with teachers. We had a significant number of teachers in our graduate courses and in-service programs who were interested in improving their instructional effectiveness, and they saw research findings as a viable resource.
Initially, our work with teachers involved simply sharing a specific research finding and engaging in discussions that included question-and-answer sessions and teachers sharing their personal experiences. These meetings were somewhat helpful. They created an awareness about the research on teaching and enhanced teacher interest in and appreciation for research findings as a helpful tool. The nonthreatening discussions created a climate in which teachers felt comfortable reflecting on and sharing ideas and issues related to the effectiveness—or lack thereof—of teacher behaviors in certain classroom situations.
But our early approach did not result in teachers trying, to any great extent, to implement any of the research findings in their classrooms (Eaker & Huffman, 1980). Simply informing teachers about research findings was not making an impact on their instructional practices. We began to question the larger process of how practitioners acquire and use