The True Purpose Of Classroom Management

The SCM approach to classroom management isn’t complicated. It isn’t burdensome or overbearing. It’s neither stressful nor manipulative. It doesn’t entail stickers or stamps, tokens or prize boxes.

It doesn’t require lectures and talking-tos, admonishments and reprimands, behavior contracts and counseling sessions.

It’s neither countdowns and threats and narrating students through every this and that. Nor is it a haphazard mix of “catching students doing good,” do-this-and-get-that economics, and other bribes, tricks, and manipulation.

No, Smart Classroom Management is simple.

It’s honest and direct. It’s purposeful and peaceful. It’s silent and unnoticeable, working behind the scenes like a lonely sub protecting the coastline.

It treats students like living and breathing people, respecting their intelligence and believing in their unlimited growth and capacity to overcome obstacles.

It’s intrinsic and joyful. It’s lessons-learned and fair to all—a safe-haven world that makes sense within one that doesn’t.

It also builds and fulfills. It empowers agency and fierce independence while softening the heart for others.

It is these things, but what is its purpose?

What is the point of classroom management generally? Is it to force, subdue, and squeeze into a box? Is it to appease or flatter into compliance? Is it to build community or simply get the teacher through the day?

No, its true purpose is to protect learning.

It’s to free the teacher to focus on great instruction and free the students to focus on their assignments and schoolwork responsibilities. In other words, the goal of classroom management is to allow for maximum time spent on academics.

That’s it.

Walk into an SCM classroom and you won’t see obvious signs of classroom management. You’ll only notice the teacher, an expert in their content area, deep in the river of exacting and exuberant instruction.

Or they’ll be off to the side, invisible and observant, as students study or perform, present and intentional, lost in the moment.

Striving for higher and higher.

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