No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship.James Comer, Yale School of Medicine
You can use the list below as your checklist for the module, and you'll want to finish each item before you move on to Module 2.
The Videos tab has a Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 walkthrough, plus videos on classroom management and the teacher-student relationship.
You can use these buttons to keep track of where you are in Module 1. Mark the module In progress when you open the readings, and mark it Complete after you submit the assignments and the exit ticket. The progress bar at the top of every page shows your status across all five modules, and your browser saves the status on this device only.
Before you write a lesson plan, before you choose a teaching strategy, before you design an assessment, you need to know what kind of teacher you're becoming and what kind of room you're running. You'll use the answer in every decision you make in a classroom, from how you arrange desks to how you respond when a student shuts down at the back of the room.
In Module 1, you'll read six chapters, and you'll use their ideas for the rest of the course. In Seifert Chapter 1, you'll examine the four trends reshaping the teaching profession, and you'll use this course's four pulls to name what brought you into it. In Chapter 2, you'll meet three theoretical lenses for explaining how students learn (behaviorism, psychological constructivism, and social constructivism), and you'll use them for the rest of the program. In Chapter 7, you'll move from theory to the classroom itself: management as prevention, procedures as taught content, and withitness. Chapter 8 is about the talk in every class period: content, procedural, and control talk; the verbal and nonverbal channels; eye contact, wait time, and social distance; and the structures of participation teachers use to decide who talks when. Marzano Chapter 8 is about effective rules, procedures, and physical layout. Marzano Chapter 9 is about the relationships a teacher builds to hold a class together: showing care, knowing students as individuals, and the discipline of objectivity and control under pressure.
You bring your reasons for teaching (Ch 1) into every relationship you build with students (Marzano Ch 9). What you understand about how students learn (Ch 2) guides how you read student behavior (Ch 7) and how you talk in class (Ch 8). When you write rules and procedures (Marzano Ch 8), you'll draw on all of it. By the end of this module, you'll have worked through every connection above, in the readings and in the interactive activities in the chapter tabs on this page.
Your beliefs about students, learning, and the purpose of school guide your decisions before you're aware you're making them. With Seifert Chapter 1 and this course's four pulls (vocation, content, young people, practical), you'll name the beliefs that brought you into teaching.
The three lenses for learning are behaviorism, psychological constructivism (Piaget), and social constructivism (Vygotsky). You can use each one to explain a different slice of what students do, and a working teacher uses all three within a single class period. You'll come back to Seifert Chapter 2 for the rest of the program.
Without a working management system, even a strong lesson falls apart in front of twenty-five students, so management comes before almost everything else you'll plan. In Seifert Chapter 7 and Marzano Chapter 8, you'll learn the core management practices: procedures, rules, layout, withitness, and graduated responses.
Teachers and students communicate all period long through verbal moves, nonverbal moves, and the gap between the two. In Seifert Chapter 8, you'll learn to name the channels, and in Marzano Chapter 9 you'll use them on purpose to build relationships that hold up under pressure.
You'll find everything for Module 1 on this page, organized into the ten tabs at the top. You can work through the tabs in order (which follows the logic of the chapters) or jump to whichever tab you need. When you click a card below, the page takes you straight to its tab.
On this tab, you'll find the at-a-glance checklist, the four core ideas, the guiding questions, the eight learning objectives, the required readings with focus notes, and the theorist preview.
In the tab for Implementing Rules and Procedures, you'll work through six characteristics of well-written rules, the physical layout audit, the graduated response scale (from eye contact through a family conference), and the case for standard operating procedures that students help design.
In the tab for Building Relationships, you'll study the six verbal and nonverbal moves of showing care, four structures for knowing students as individuals, peer-to-peer valuing through cooperative structures, and the six strategies for objectivity and control under pressure.
In the tab for The Changing Teacher Profession and You, you'll read about the four pulls (vocation, content, young people, practical) and the four trends reshaping the work (diversity, technology, accountability, professionalism). The tab includes the trend-sort drag-and-drop.
In the tab for The Learning Process, you'll study behaviorism (classical and operant conditioning), psychological constructivism (Piaget's assimilation, accommodation, equilibrium, and schema), and social constructivism (Vygotsky's ZPD). The tab includes an animated classical-conditioning diagram, theorist flip cards, and a memory match.
In the tab for Classroom Management and the Learning Environment, you'll read about prevention versus discipline, the physical environment, procedures and rules, pacing, withitness, and the ripple effect. The tab adds four management models from outside the chapter (Maslow, Glasser, Canter, and Skinner) and includes the Maslow pyramid diagram, the Canter / Glasser / Skinner sort, and the CHAMPS field builder.
You can read about the nature of classroom communication: the three functions of classroom talk (content, procedural, control); verbal, nonverbal, and unintended channels; eye contact, wait time, and social distance with cultural variation; and six structures of participation.
The Videos tab has seven chapter walkthroughs, two talks on why teachers do this work (Dalton Sherman, Rita Pierson), and two demos of learning theory in action (Piaget's conservation task, Vygotsky's ZPD). Dr. Gill is still recording the module introduction, and you'll find it at the top of the tab when it's ready. You can bring the connections you make into the module discussions.
You can work through three branching scenarios drawn from the chapter material. In each one, you'll face a specific classroom situation (rules on day two, management theory in action, a parent email) and see where your choices lead. You can replay any scenario to try a different path.
You can take the fill-in-the-blank self-check on Module 1 vocabulary, and the check accepts synonyms. Use it as a final pass before you mark the module Complete with the status buttons on the Overview tab.
You can carry the questions below with you as you work through the chapters and activities. They show up again in the assignments and in Discussion 2.
Each objective is tagged with the SEC 507 Course Learning Objective (CLO) it addresses.
You'll want to read each chapter before you work through its tab on this page. In the note under each reading, you'll find the focus and the assignment it connects to.
The cards below are a quick reference to the theorists you're about to meet. You'll meet Pavlov, Skinner, Piaget, and Vygotsky in the Seifert Ch 2 tab, and Maslow, Glasser, Canter, and Kounin in the Seifert Ch 7 tab.
Click a card to see the definition on the back. After you check yourself, mark the card Got it or Review again, and your browser will save your progress.
This module has four graded assignments, the three projects below and the exit ticket, plus two discussions. You'll find each project described here with its rubric. Submit your work in Canvas when you're ready.
You can draft four to six classroom rules for the content area and grade level you teach (or plan to teach). You'll rely on the rules and their procedures from the first week of school through the rest of the year.
1. Four to six rules. You can state each one in the positive, in words a student can watch for and act on. Each rule names a behavior students can produce instead of a value they should hold, and each one is tied to a management area in your grade level and content area.
2. A paired procedure for each rule. Your procedure lists the taught steps for the rule: what students do, when they do it, where they do it, and how they know they got it right. It should account for transitions, materials, and movement.
3. A rationale for each rule. Your rationale cites by number the Marzano Chapter 8 elements behind the rule, with an example from the room you teach. You can name the management theory behind your approach (Maslow, Glasser, Canter, Skinner, or a combination) as supporting context. The element numbers are the graded part of this criterion.
4. An enforcement plan. For each rule, you can name two moves on Marzano's graduated response scale (eye contact, proximity, redirect, check-in, formal consequence, conference) for the moment a student tests it. Each consequence should connect to the rule a student broke.
5. At least two positive reinforcement strategies. Your plan names the concrete moves you can use to acknowledge students who follow the rules, and how often you'll use each one.
Format: Your submission is a single document, 600 to 900 words, organized and polished enough to hand to students and families on day one.
Open assignment brief → Submit on Canvas →| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rule Selection & Rationale | 25 | You choose rules for the management areas that matter most in your grade and content area, and your rationale cites Marzano elements by number with an example from your own room. 25 | You cover the key management areas, and your rationale points at Marzano without naming element numbers or giving examples. 19 | You use generic rules or borrow them from a template, and your rationale mentions management theory without connecting it to a practice. 12 | Your rules are vague or too numerous, or you leave them out, and you give no rationale. 6 |
| Procedure Design | 25 | You pair every rule with a step-by-step procedure a student can follow without prompting, and your procedures account for transitions, materials, and movement. 25 | You pair most rules with a workable procedure, and a few of them need more detail before a student could follow them alone. 19 | You write procedures for some rules, and they either stop short or assume you step in at every point. 12 | You leave procedures out, or you describe them in terms like "be respectful" that a student cannot act on. 6 |
| Enforcement Plan | 25 | Your consequences are graduated, logical, and tied to the specific rule a student broke, and you name concrete positive reinforcement strategies of more than one kind. 25 | Your consequences are clear and connected to your rules, and your reinforcement strategies work but run to one or two kinds. 19 | Your consequences exist but do not connect to specific rules, and you mention reinforcement without saying what it looks like. 12 | You give no clear consequence structure, or your plan is punitive with no positive reinforcement in it. 6 |
| Presentation & Professionalism | 25 | You produce a document you could hand to students and families on day one: polished, organized, and easy to read at a glance. 25 | You produce a clear, organized document with minor formatting problems. 19 | Your document reads well enough but lacks visual organization or carries errors. 12 | Your document is disorganized, carries significant errors, or stops before it is finished. 6 |
You can sketch the room you're able to set up, then annotate it for visibility, traffic flow, and management rationale. You use your layout to manage behavior in every period, often without students noticing, and in this assignment you'll explain each layout choice in writing.
1. An annotated floor plan. You'll draw the plan to approximate scale, with dimensions labeled and a legend for the furniture and equipment. Your plan marks every student desk, the teacher's desk, high-traffic intersections, sight lines from your default teaching position, and any "calm corner" or low-stimulation zone.
2. Four labeled zones. Your plan includes zones for direct instruction, collaborative work, independent practice, and materials storage. You can label each zone on the plan and give the instructional reason behind it.
3. Traffic flow and access. Your plan shows clear paths for your own circulation, for student movement, and for emergency exit. A student in a wheelchair or using an assistive device should reach every zone without rerouting the room.
4. A design rationale. Your rationale cites Marzano elements by number and connects each zone to the instruction you plan to run in it. You can name the activity behind your default arrangement, then the rehearsed transitions to your second-most-common arrangement, with the cue you'll use and the procedure students follow. You can use arrows on the floor plan to show the transition.
Before you submit: you can run the eight-item Classroom Layout Audit (in the Marzano Ch 8 tab) against your design. The audit is a check on your own work rather than a graded deliverable, and you can attach it if you want feedback on it.
Format: Your submission is a floor plan (PDF or image) plus a written rationale, 500 to 800 words.
Open assignment brief →| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design Rationale | 25 | You cite specific Marzano elements for your layout choices, connect each zone to an instructional purpose, and explain how the room supports the way you manage a class. 25 | You reference management principles and connect most zones to an instructional purpose. 19 | You mention general classroom management ideas without tying them to the layout decisions you made. 12 | You give no rationale, or your rationale never connects the layout to an instructional or management goal. 6 |
| Traffic Flow & Accessibility | 25 | Your floor plan shows clear paths for your own circulation, for student movement, and for emergency exit, and a wheelchair or assistive device can use them without a detour. 25 | Your paths handle normal movement, and you consider accessibility without working out the detail. 19 | Some of your paths are blocked or narrow, and you address accessibility in the text but not in the drawing. 12 | Your traffic flow creates bottlenecks, and you do not consider accessibility. 6 |
| Zone Design | 25 | You define distinct zones for direct instruction, collaborative work, independent practice, and materials storage, and you label and justify the purpose of each. 25 | You define and label three or more zones, and most of them serve a clear instructional purpose. 19 | Your zones overlap or lack a clear purpose, and your labels do not follow one pattern. 12 | You leave the room as one undifferentiated space, or your zones do not serve an instructional goal. 6 |
| Visual Quality | 25 | You draw the floor plan to approximate scale, label it with dimensions, and include a legend for furniture and equipment. 25 | You draw a clear, labeled floor plan, and the scale is approximate but usable. 19 | You draw the plan by hand or on screen but leave out labels or any reference to scale. 12 | Your floor plan is unfinished, hard to read, or missing. 6 |
You'll design a single classroom activity that pairs students across content backgrounds and produces a cross-curricular connection. The pairing depends on the relationship work from Marzano Ch 9, and in this assignment you'll make the pairing visible.
1. Activity description. Your description starts with measurable learning objectives written with Bloom's verbs, followed by the step-by-step procedures, the materials list, and a timing estimate. Another teacher should have enough detail to run the activity without calling you.
2. Pairing strategy. You'll name a focal pair: the two students whose pairing will show you whether the class has built trust. In a one-paragraph note, you'll explain how you'll pair the rest of the room (interest, ability, choice, random) and why.
3. Cross-curricular connection. You can name the explicit connection to a content area outside your own through a shared problem, theme, or skill, then explain how the activity makes the connection visible to students. If you could remove one discipline and the activity would still work, you don't have the connection yet.
4. Success criterion. You can name the observable outcome for the activity, then describe what students discuss, build, or solve. The second discipline should be the reason the work is worth doing.
Format: Your submission is a single document, 400 to 600 words.
Open assignment brief →| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discipline Integration | 18 | You connect two or more disciplines through a shared problem, theme, or skill, and the connection holds up because the activity would break without either one. 18 | You connect two disciplines through a clear shared element. 14 | You mention a connection between disciplines, but the activity would still work inside a single one. 9 | You draw no real connection between the disciplines. 4 |
| Activity Design | 16 | You give another teacher enough to run the activity: objectives, materials, procedures, and timing. 16 | You include most of what another teacher would need, with small gaps. 12 | You describe the activity in general terms, and another teacher could not run it from what you wrote. 8 | Your activity is vague or unfinished. 4 |
| Student Engagement | 16 | Your activity asks students to discuss, build, or solve something, and the second discipline is what makes it worth doing. 16 | Your students take an active part, and the interdisciplinary element adds to their engagement. 12 | You direct most of the activity yourself, and the interdisciplinary element does not add engagement. 8 | Your activity keeps students passive. 4 |
| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Content & Depth | 18 | You show you understand the module's core concepts, name specific readings, theories, or Marzano elements, and connect them to what happens in your classroom. 18 | You engage the core concepts and reference the readings, and your connections to practice stay general. 14 | You stay on topic at the surface and mention the readings in passing without an example. 9 | You do not engage the module content, or you go off topic. 4 |
| Peer Engagement | 16 | You reply to at least two peers and add something: a follow-up question, a counterpoint, or a new example that extends their idea. 16 | You reply to two peers with relevant, constructive comments, and one of them could go deeper. 12 | You reply, and the replies are brief affirmations without substance. 8 | You reply to fewer than two peers, or your replies do not engage what they said. 4 |
| Presentation Quality | 16 | Your video is clear and organized, runs within the time guidelines, and you talk to the cohort rather than read to them. 16 | Your video is clear and holds its shape, and you read from notes while keeping the audience with you. 12 | A viewer can follow your video, and it is disorganized or read start to finish from a script. 8 | Your video is unclear, too short, or missing. 4 |
You can record a two- to three-minute introduction. Tell the cohort your name, your school, what you teach, and one professional goal for the term. You'll use this course's four pulls to name what drew you into teaching and the four trends from Seifert Ch 1 to name the trend your goal addresses.
Initial post. Your post runs two to three minutes and names the pull that drew you in, a specific goal, and the trend the goal addresses.
Two peer replies. Each reply names something specific from the peer's introduction and adds to the conversation.
Open Discussion 1 prompt →You can bring a specific management decision (yours or one you watched) and the theory behind it, in a two- to three-minute response. Your post should name at least one of the four management models (Maslow, Glasser, Canter, Skinner).
Initial post. Your post names a specific decision, the theory behind it, and one move on Marzano's graduated response scale you'd use if a student tested the decision.
Two peer replies. Each reply engages with the peer's theoretical choice and adds an alternative or extension.
Open Discussion 2 prompt →Module 1 has three projects, and you'll build each one on the one before. In the Classroom Rules Project, you'll draft the rules and procedures for week one. In the Classroom Layout Project, you'll read your room the way a teacher would, then design it on purpose. In the Interdisciplinary Activity, you'll pair students across content backgrounds and design a connection students notice. By the time you reach the third assignment, you should be able to connect your beliefs about teaching to the specific routines, rules, and pairings you can use.
If you wrote one thing into your rules and another into your layout, go back and reconcile them before you submit, because your rules and your layout belong to one management system and need to agree.
After you've finished all the readings, activities, and assignments for this module, respond to the prompt below. Submit your response in the Exit Ticket: Module 1 assignment in Canvas (25 points).
If you can answer the prompt with specifics, you're doing the reflective work for this module. If the answer feels vague, go back to the tab on the concept you're unsure about and work through the activity again.
Submit in Canvas →You'll read Chapter 8 for week one because the rules, procedures, and physical setup of your room affect almost everything you do after them. Your pacing, your questions, your feedback, and the lesson you spent four hours planning all depend on whether students walk in knowing where to sit, what to do, and what happens when they choose otherwise. The chapter belongs to the management group of Marzano's framework, and Marzano treats five overlapping moves: setting up the room, establishing rules and procedures, demonstrating withitness, acknowledging adherence, and acknowledging lack of adherence.
Marzano divides the work into two halves. The first half is design: you set the rules and procedures, you arrange the furniture, and you teach the routines the same way you teach content. The second half is response: you notice when students follow the rules, you notice when they don't, and you handle each case in a way that keeps the class moving without damaging relationships. You can read the chapter alongside Seifert Chapter 7, which covers the same ground from a different angle. Seifert organizes the work around prevention versus discipline, and Marzano organizes it around the specific elements of a healthy classroom culture.
On this tab, you'll work through the chapter in six sections: the place of rules and procedures in the New Art and Science framework, when and how to establish them at the start of the year, the physical layout decisions that produce a perception of order, the response moves for adherence and non-adherence, the place of standard operating procedures and student co-design, and what the chapter means for your Module 1 deliverables.
In The New Art and Science of Teaching, Marzano organizes effective practice into ten design areas, and each area has elements that name specific teacher moves. Chapter 8 covers five elements: the physical layout of the classroom, rules and procedures, withitness, acknowledging adherence to rules and procedures, and acknowledging lack of adherence. You'll find each element's number and full title in the book. Marzano aims all five elements at the same goal: a classroom where the layout and the routines prevent most management problems.
Marzano argues most management problems are predictable, and a teacher can design most predictable problems out of the room instead of responding to them one at a time. His position is close to Seifert's prevention-first frame from Chapter 7, with sharper attention to specific teacher moves and the order in which they're most useful. You'll use all five elements at the same time during the first weeks of school.
A rule names the expectation, and a procedure names the steps. You teach both, and you reteach both as often as you teach the content. Before anything else in the chapter, Marzano wants you to make the teaching and reteaching a habit.
Marzano names the first one to two weeks of school as the time to set general rules and procedures. The two weeks mark the window when students are most open to a new class culture. If you define the culture later, you'll fight the culture students invented in the gap. If you define it earlier, you risk announcing rules students have no context for.
Marzano's six characteristics of well-written rules and procedures match the management research you've already read in Seifert Chapter 7. In the list below, Marzano's framing is combined with practical tests for whether a rule will hold up under classroom pressure.
You can set four to six rules and no more. With a long list, students lose track of the rules and find too many seams to test. Choose the rules that cover the most behavior, and let your procedures handle the rest.
The rule names what students should do instead of what they should avoid. "Listen when a classmate is speaking" gives students more to work with than "no interrupting." The positive form gives students a behavior to aim for.
You should be able to point at the behavior and name it. "Be respectful" names a value, while "Track the speaker with your eyes" names a behavior you can teach, model, and acknowledge.
Students who help draft the rules enforce them through peer norms. You set up the conversation, keep the non-negotiables fixed, and let students shape the rest.
If you enforce a rule on Tuesday and wave it off on Friday, students stop believing it. You'll want to choose rules you can enforce every day, and then enforce them the same way each time.
You model the procedure, you have students rehearse it, and you reteach it the second week when it slips.
Most teachers cut corners when they teach procedures. Marzano names the cost: if you announce a procedure and never rehearse it, the procedure breaks the first time anything in the day changes. If you model, rehearse, and reinforce it, the procedure holds. You'll see the difference on day three, when the bell rings and the class either settles into the routine or waits for you to explain it again.
Section 3One element covers the physical layout. Marzano treats the room arrangement as a management tool you use in the background of every period. When a room is well arranged, students don't notice the arrangement. When the arrangement is poor, you'll deal with a steady stream of small management problems, and the cause is hard to pin down because it comes from the furniture and floor plan instead of from student behavior.
You'll make four layout decisions. Sight lines: every student should be able to see the board and the teacher from their assigned seat. Traffic flow: high-use zones should not block each other, and routes between them should not cross student work areas. Materials access: students should be able to get what they need without help. Seating arrangement: the default should match the most common activity, with rehearsed transitions to other arrangements when activities change. You can use the audit below to check the four decisions in your own room. The audit works best as a working tool you run more than once while you draft.
One element covers acknowledging adherence to rules and procedures. When a student follows the rule, you say so, and the acknowledgment confirms the expectation for the student and for everyone else watching. Marzano recommends specific acknowledgment that names the rule and the behavior. "Marcus, you tracked the speaker the whole time. Thank you" works better than "Good job, Marcus," because the specific version tells the class what you noticed and why.
Another element covers acknowledging lack of adherence. Marzano provides a graduated set of strategies, from low-key responses (eye contact, proximity, a quiet name-and-redirect) to higher-key ones (direct conference, calling home, formal consequences). Most off-task behavior stops at the low-key end, so you work up the scale one step at a time. If you skip straight to the high-key end, students learn you have no intermediate tools, and minor problems turn into major ones. With a graduated response, the student also gets a chance to self-correct without needing to save face.
Eye contact is the smallest possible response. You look at the student and hold the look until they notice. At this stage, most off-task students are testing whether you can see them, and the look tells them you can.
If eye contact doesn't correct the behavior, you move toward the student and keep teaching without stopping the lesson. Students read the shift in distance as a nonverbal cue, and it works most of the time.
You might say, "Marcus, eyes on the page, please." You keep the redirect short, specific, and calm, then go on with the lesson without a lecture. You keep the redirect quiet so only the student hears it.
If the behavior continues, you have a thirty-second private exchange with the student after the activity ends. You name the behavior, name its impact, and ask what the student needs, and then you go back to teaching.
If the lower moves don't work, you apply the agreed-on consequence the same way every time, without elaboration. Students get the message from the consequence, so you don't need to add a speech.
For repeated or serious issues, you hold a longer conversation with the student, the family, and (when needed) school administration. By this point, the lower-key moves haven't worked, so you're looking for a structural change in how the student engages with the class.
New teachers on this scale most often skip levels. The next most common mistake is staying on the lowest level when the situation calls for the next one up. Marzano emphasizes graduated strategies in part to guard against both errors, so you match the response to the situation instead of to your mood.
Section 5Standard operating procedures, or SOPs, are routines formalized to the point where students run them without prompting. Examples include the morning entry, the homework return, the classroom-cleanup sequence, and the transition between activities. Each routine becomes an SOP when students do it the same way every day, even when the teacher is busy elsewhere.
The strongest SOPs are co-designed. Students help write them, sometimes by drafting the language and sometimes by stress-testing the teacher's drafts. You get three things from co-design: SOPs that fit the class as it is, student ownership, and a signal of respect. Students enforce a procedure they helped write through peer norms, and they see their ideas shaping how the class runs.
Co-design has risks too. Students may push for procedures that are unworkable, that conflict with school policy, or that favor some students over others without anyone saying so. Your job in co-design is to frame the work: you keep the non-negotiables fixed (safety, school policy, equity), explain why they exist, and let students shape the rest.
You can pick one procedure you dictate now and use it as the test. Tomorrow, ask the class for two ways the procedure could work better, write both on paper, and run the better one for a week. The exercise takes five minutes, and it shows students their input carries weight in your classroom.
You'll use Chapter 8 in both the Classroom Rules Project and the Classroom Layout Project. As you draft your rules list, write the procedure beside each rule, because students can't follow a rule until they know the steps for carrying it out. As you sketch the layout, walk the route a student takes from the door to their seat, then the route from their seat to the trash can, then the route to the pencil sharpener. Watch where the paths cross, because you'll need withitness most at those intersections.
For Discussion 2 in week two, the cohort will compare management decisions and the theories behind them. You can bring a specific procedure you plan to teach on day one and the cue you can use to signal it. The strongest posts will name the procedure and the move on Marzano's graduated response scale you'd use if a student tested it.
The study guide for The New Art and Science of Teaching includes discussion questions for Chapter 8, and you'll want to think through at least two of them before Discussion 2.
Write your guess down before you look, because committing to an answer first gives you something to compare with the chapter. To frame your answer, ask what students need to do at 8:02 a.m. on day one.
What's the difference between a rule and a procedure in your classroom? Write one of each, and then name the move on Marzano's graduated response scale you'd use if a student tested the rule.
Draw the room you want for the first month and mark the high-traffic intersections. Then place yourself where you can see the whole room without moving. You'll submit the drawing and the rationale behind it in the Classroom Layout Project.
Open the assignmentYou can pick one procedure you announce out loud and never reteach. Tomorrow, teach it the way you'd teach content: show it, walk students through it, and have them rehearse it twice. If you track it for one week, you'll see whether students follow the procedure without prompting.
Once the procedure has held for five class periods in a row, you can move on and teach the next one.
Here's the same rule written four different ways. Hover over the numbers in the example to see the notes on each draft.
Draft 1: Be respectful.
Draft 2: Do not interrupt others when they are speaking.
Draft 3: Listen when others are speaking, and wait for them to finish before you respond.
Draft 4: We listen when someone is speaking. We wait for the speaker to finish before we respond.
"Respectful" means twenty different things to twenty students, so nobody can observe it or enforce it.
The draft tells the student what to stop instead of what to start. Word your rules to point students toward the behavior you want to see.
The draft names an observable behavior, so the student knows what success looks like.
The pronoun "we" includes the teacher, so the rules describe how the whole class runs, teacher included, instead of how students behave toward the teacher.
In Chapter 9, Marzano answers a question he only hints at in Chapter 8: with rules and procedures, a room stays functional, but why would students want to take part in it? Marzano's answer is the teacher-student relationship. Students who feel known, valued, and treated fairly will give you the benefit of the doubt on the days when you run long, the room gets hot, and your patience wears thin. Students who feel anonymous, unseen, or singled out are slower to extend the same patience.
Marzano divides the relationship work into three elements: using verbal and nonverbal behavior that shows affection for students, understanding students' backgrounds and interests, and displaying objectivity and control, most of all when student behavior provokes a reaction. You'll be doing all three at once during the first weeks of school and across the rest of the year.
On this tab, you'll work through the chapter in seven sections: where the work fits in the framework, the small moves of verbal and nonverbal affection, the structures for getting to know students as individuals, the design choices that produce peer-to-peer valuing, the discipline of objectivity and control under pressure, the periodic review that keeps the work from fading, and what the chapter means for your Module 1 deliverables.
Marzano groups the forty-three elements of his framework into ten design areas. Building relationships is in the Context group, alongside engagement and high expectations. Marzano grouped them on purpose: he argues relationships, engagement, and expectations form the social-emotional context every other part of teaching depends on. A teacher who is brilliant at content delivery and weak at relationships will produce limited learning. A teacher who is solid at content delivery and strong at relationships will produce more learning than the first.
In Marzano's account, bad relationships in a classroom work against good instruction. Students who feel disliked by the teacher resist learning content from the teacher, even when the content is well presented. Students who feel liked are willing to take academic risks, ask for help, and stay on task through difficult work. Relationships are part of the professional groundwork for academic learning.
Marzano treats relationships as a condition for learning. Teachers build them with a set of moves anyone can learn, observe, and improve, and the moves produce measurable differences in student learning.
The first element covers the small, repeated behaviors that show students a teacher cares about them as people. Marzano describes the behaviors in detail because they're easy to get wrong. "Showing care" is a specific set of teacher actions students can notice within the first week of class.
The teacher stands at the doorway as students arrive, holds eye contact with each one, says the student's name, and acknowledges something specific when possible (a sports result, a recovery from absence, a piece of work submitted). The greeting takes ten seconds per student, and over time each student learns you see them by name, every day.
The pronunciation a student uses is the one to follow. The teacher asks, writes the name out the way it sounds, and rehearses it. The surest signal of disregard is mispronouncing or shortening a student's name without permission. Getting the name right signals respect with the same force.
"Strong analysis on question three, Marcus" works better than "good job." The specific version names the work and shows you read it. The vague version sounds like a default any student could have triggered, and students notice the difference.
You might go to a sports event, a concert, or a science fair, or send a brief congratulation when a student receives a recognition posted on the school's bulletin board. The visit and the note tell students you see their whole lives outside your room. One visit or note per student per semester is enough.
You'll want an open posture, eye contact at the student's level (sitting or kneeling for younger students who are seated), and a slight lean-in during one-on-one conversation. Avoid the "looming over the desk" posture, which signals correction even when your words are warm. When your posture and your words send different messages, students tend to trust the posture.
"I'll get back to you on that by Friday" is a small promise. The teacher who makes it either keeps it or apologizes when she can't. Students keep track of small promises with more care than teachers realize. A teacher who keeps small promises builds trust faster than a teacher who makes grand gestures and forgets the small ones.
For one full week, you can greet every student by name at the door and write down the names you forget. The names you miss show you which relationships need the most work. To recover, greet the missed student first thing the next day, by name and with eye contact, without an apology that draws attention to the miss.
The second element covers understanding students' backgrounds and interests. It's harder than showing care because you need structures for collecting information about each student. Marzano features strategies for this element in table 9.2. You can use the four structures below, and you'll learn the most when you combine them instead of picking one.
An interest inventory is a short questionnaire you give in the first week of class. The standard items are favorite subject, hardest subject, what you do outside school, what you want from this class, and one thing the teacher should know about you. You can use paper, a digital form, or a brief one-on-one conversation. You'll want to come back to the answers through the term instead of collecting them once and forgetting them.
Hallway conversations are brief, informal exchanges before class, between classes, or at the door, and each one takes about two minutes. Ask a specific question instead of "how are you," which gets an autopilot answer. Questions such as "How did the band concert go?" or "Did the pickup truck make it through the weekend?" get you information worth having. Over a term, the conversations add up, and you know something about each student's life even though no single conversation took more than two minutes.
You can make one positive contact home in the first three weeks of class for every student. The contact is brief: a phone call, an email, a postcard. The content is specific praise about something the student did. Families who have only heard from teachers about problems remember the first positive contact for years. With one early contact, you bring the family in as a partner before there's a problem to solve.
You can choose curriculum content that gives students windows into other students' backgrounds and mirrors of their own. In the "windows and mirrors" frame (Bishop, 1990), students need both: they should see people like themselves represented as worthy of study, and they should see people unlike themselves represented in ways that build empathy. The choice is about curriculum and relationships at once, because students notice which voices get included and which don't.
Marzano offers a caution about knowing students as individuals: you're trying to learn enough to teach each student as an individual, and you don't need to know everything about them. New teachers sometimes try to build a deep relationship with every student in the first month and burn out. Marzano recommends a baseline of structured information (inventories, family contacts) plus a steady habit of brief informal conversations. You can collect the baseline information in the first weeks, and the deeper relationships will develop across the year.
Section 4The relationship you build with each student is one channel. The relationships students build with each other are the second channel, and they matter as much as the first. Marzano treats peer-to-peer valuing as the teacher's design responsibility.
The surest way to build peer-to-peer valuing is structured opportunity. In cooperative-learning structures (jigsaw, think-pair-share, numbered heads together), students depend on each other to finish tasks, and the dependence gives them reasons to notice each other's strengths. With heterogeneous grouping across academic levels, language backgrounds, and social cliques, you break up the segregation students sometimes impose on themselves. When you model public recognition of peers' contributions, students pick up the habit.
In peer-to-peer valuing, your job is to design the structures where students come to know each other's contributions, because you can't instruct students to value each other. Marzano accepts not every student will like every other student. You're aiming for a class where students respect each other's contributions, whether or not everyone is friends.
Section 5You use objectivity and control to protect the relationship work when a student's behavior tests it. A student snaps at you, tests a rule on purpose, or says something that touches a personal nerve. In those moments, your job is to respond as the teacher of the whole class instead of as the person being pushed.
Marzano lists strategies for displaying objectivity and control in table 9.3. This course offers the six strategies below as small moves you can rehearse, and you can use each one to keep your response from turning into a reaction.
You notice when you're about to respond from heat instead of from your professional posture. Your pulse, your jaw, your breath, and the urge to say something cutting are the signs. Once you notice the signs, you can use the next strategy.
You take one breath before responding, or three if you need them. During the pause, you let the heat pass and choose the professional response. Students read the pause as composure.
"That comment is out of bounds" is different from "you are out of bounds." The first sentence names a specific action the student can correct. The second judges the person, and it shuts down any chance of repair.
"We will talk after class" is an honest promise. You get the rest of the period to teach, and the student gets time to settle. Then you keep the appointment, and you keep the talk brief, private, and specific. By deferring, you set up the conditions for a productive conversation.
You greet the student who tested a rule yesterday by name today, with no leftover tension from yesterday's exchange. The reset tells the student the relationship is intact. If you hold a grudge across days, the class learns your affection depends on flawless behavior.
If the moment requires documentation (for a behavior plan, an admin loop, an IEP team), you write it after you dismiss the class, out of the students' sight. Documentation in public feels like punishment to the student and like a spectacle to everyone else.
You won't use a strategy under pressure unless you've rehearsed it. Before the moment arrives, pick two of the six strategies above as your default moves, and rehearse them.
Marzano also asks teachers to review the relationship work on a regular schedule. Teachers find the habit easy to skip, and without it the relationship work often fades after the first month. You can set a calendar reminder once a month for the first half of the year and every six weeks for the rest of the year. At each review, ask yourself three questions. Which students do you know well, and which don't you know? Which students have you had a good one-on-one conversation with in the last two weeks? Which students would say, if asked, that you treat them fairly?
The review stays honest when you write down the answers, because you'll see gaps on paper your memory tends to smooth over. A teacher who writes down the names of students they haven't connected with yet will work on those connections. A teacher who only thinks about it will assume things are fine.
Marzano accepts relationships won't all deepen on the same timeline. Some students arrive with histories that make trust slow. Some are protecting themselves from teachers who burned them in earlier grades. Some are quiet and need the teacher to make the first bid for connection. With periodic review, you can catch yourself spending the most energy on the students who respond fastest while the slower-trusting students get less of you.
Section 7The Classroom Rules Project asks for rules and procedures, and it also asks how you'll enforce them without damaging relationships. As you draft, ask which of Marzano's affection moves you can make routine and which control-and-objectivity strategies you can rehearse in advance, because you won't use an unrehearsed strategy under pressure.
For the Interdisciplinary Activity, you can see the relationship work in how you pair students across content backgrounds. Students teach each other when they trust each other, so you build trust in week one to make the activity work. As you design the activity, name the focal pair: the two students whose pairing will show you whether the class has built trust.
The study guide for The New Art and Science of Teaching includes discussion questions for Chapter 9, and you'll want to think through at least two of them before Discussion 2.
Think of one student you haven't built a connection with yet. What specific move will you try with the student this week, and which structure for knowing students can you use to learn who the student is outside your room?
In the Interdisciplinary Activity, you'll design a task that pairs students across content backgrounds, and the task depends on the relationship work you've already done. Name the two students whose pairing will show you whether the class has built trust, and describe what success would look like.
Open the assignmentSeifert and Sutton open Chapter 1 with three teachers' reflections. At the end of the day, Ashley asks herself why she's teaching and answers with her students. Nathan didn't expect five students learning English, two or three with reading disabilities, and so much work on computers. Jennifer Fuller walks through her day teaching tenth-grade biology, from morning email to the Ecology Club after school. In each reflection, you can see a teaching day made of small judgment calls, and Seifert and Sutton trace the satisfaction of the work and the difficulty of the work to the same source.
Seifert and Sutton write the chapter with two goals. First, they're honest about why people teach: the lasting satisfactions of laying groundwork for lifelong learning, of designing complex activities that put ideas in students' hands, and of the novelty in a job that never gets boring. Second, they're honest about how the profession has changed in the last twenty years. Four trends in particular are reshaping what teachers do every day, and the authors work through each one. Once you can name the trends, you'll have language for what you're about to walk into.
On this tab, you'll work through the chapter in five sections: why people teach, the four trends at a glance, a deep look at diversity, the other three trends in turn, and what action research and the growth of professionalism mean for your first year.
Seifert and Sutton's first answer to "why teach" is the satisfaction of laying groundwork for lifelong learning. You won't teach any one student forever, but you'll work with them long enough to show them the world holds more to learn than any single teacher can provide. Whatever the subject, the immensity of the field can become a source of curiosity, wonder, and excitement. As a teacher, you get to teach valuable knowledge and skills and, in the same breath, point students past what they'll be able to learn in your room (Seifert & Sutton, 2009).
The second answer is the satisfaction of designing and orchestrating complex activities in which students take hold of new ideas and skills. The challenge attracts many teachers because the artistry of the job is in the designing. Students will depend on your skill at planning and managing, often without knowing it. They need you to explain ideas in plain terms, to sequence new material at a workable pace, and to point out connections between today's lesson and what they already know. The skills take a lifetime to master, you start practicing them in your first lesson, and even beginning teachers get better with each lesson they teach.
The third answer is novelty. Classroom life is so complex the work almost never stays the same. A student shows an insight you didn't expect, or fails to show one you were sure she had. An activity goes better than planned, or worse, or sideways. One day you understand why a student behaves the way he does, and you start thinking about a better response. If you teach the same objective four times, you'll understand it differently the fourth time than the first.
Seifert and Sutton are also honest about the price. They pair each satisfaction of teaching with a frustration. You may want to make a positive difference in students' lives and still have a hard time reaching individuals. The complexity behind the artistry can overwhelm you, and unexpected events can turn into chaos instead of novelty. Sometimes, to paraphrase Kushner, bad things happen to good teachers. The authors accept the cost and argue the difficult parts make the satisfying parts more valuable, and they point out the resources for handling the hard parts (this textbook included) exist for a reason. You won't have to go it alone, but you'll be responsible for becoming and remaining the best teacher you can be.
A vocation is the sense that teaching is what you're for: the work fits your sense of purpose so well you'd feel hollow doing anything else. A sense of vocation doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your health or your life outside school to the job. Teachers with a strong vocation tend to weather the hard months better, and they also tend to pour too much in without resting, so watch for both.
You like the subject and read about it on your own time, and you'd rather spend an hour on the chemistry of bread baking than scroll a feed. You'll lean on the interest through the planning and the marking. The same interest can tempt you to lecture about your own enthusiasms when the lesson calls for student work, so watch for it.
Some teachers draw their energy from a classroom of teenagers, day after day. Teachers with this pull believe adolescents are people whose decisions and capacities are worth respect, whether or not they like every student. Teachers without this pull tend to burn out faster, even when the other three pulls are strong.
The practical pulls include the schedule, the autonomy of a closed classroom door, the stability of a public-sector career, the pension, and the sense of being part of an institution. These pulls carry weight, and while they won't keep you in the job on their own, they steady you when the other pulls waver.
Most teachers carry some of each pull, and the mix changes over a career. If you know which pull is strongest for you, you can predict which parts of the job will energize you and which will wear you down. Your Module 1 work on classroom rules and relationships will go better when you can name the pull driving you on a given day.
Next, Seifert and Sutton name four trends that separate teaching now from teaching a generation ago. Each trend changes what teachers do, what they need to know, and how they prepare. You'll see all four in your residency, and you'll find them easier to act on once you have language for them. The authors preview the four trends here and then give each one its own section.
Students today differ more in language, ability, age range, family structure, and cultural background than they did even one generation ago. Seifert and Sutton treat diversity as the most consequential trend. It has made teaching more rewarding as a career and more demanding in specific, nameable ways.
Classrooms, schools, and students use computers more often than in the past for research, writing, communication, and record-keeping. Technology has opened new ways for students to learn (this textbook would not exist without it). It has also altered what counts as effective teaching and raised hard questions about what teaching is for in the first place.
The public and educators themselves pay more attention than in the past to how learning gets measured and how teaching gets assessed. The attention has raised the importance of education in public conversation, has improved outcomes for some students, and has put new constraints on what teachers teach and what students learn.
Teachers now assess the quality of their own work and their colleagues' work, and take steps to improve when needed. With professionalism, the standard of practice goes up, and so does the worry, for new teachers most of all, about whether a particular teacher or school is "good enough."
You can drag each scenario into the trend it illustrates best. Most scenarios touch more than one trend, so go with the closest match. When you're done, click Check to see how you did.
Seifert and Sutton spend the most time on diversity because the other three trends connect back to it. Students have always been diverse, but in recent decades the forms and the extent of the diversity have grown. Teachers are more likely than before to serve students from diverse language backgrounds, students with identified special educational needs, and students whose age ranges and life experiences fall outside the traditional grade bands. Seifert and Sutton work through four kinds of diversity in detail.
About 14 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic, with about 20 percent of the group speaking Spanish as their main language at home and another half speaking limited English (United States Census Bureau, 2005). The numbers for other language groups vary by region, but the pattern is similar: classrooms today are more multilingual than the classrooms most current teachers grew up in. Part of the response is institutional, with specialized second-language teachers and dedicated classes. The other part of the response happens in regular classrooms across grade levels and subjects.
You'll need to plan lessons and tasks emerging-English students can understand while you keep the major learning goals of the curriculum on track. Few teachers speak fluent Spanish, so the adjustment can be a challenge. You'll find strategies in Chapter 4 (Student Diversity) and Chapter 10 (Planning Instruction). Seifert and Sutton take a practical position: language access is part of teaching, and every teacher handles it.
The inclusion of students with disabilities in classrooms with non-disabled peers is the second strand of the diversity trend. The U.S. shift began in the 1970s and accelerated with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, which Congress renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990 and amended again in 2004 (United States Government Printing Office, 2005). The law guarantees a free, appropriate education for children with disabilities of any kind, whether the impairment is physical, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral. The law also recognizes that such students need special supports to learn and function alongside their peers, so it provides for special services (teaching assistants, related services) and the procedural framework for individualized education plans.
Most American and Canadian teachers now have at least a few students with special educational needs in their roster, even if they aren't trained as special educators and have had no prior personal experience with people with disabilities. Classroom teachers also work as part of a professional team focused on helping these students learn as well as possible and participate in the life of the school. The trend toward inclusion raises practical questions (how does any teacher find time to plan for individuals?) and deeper ones about what in the curriculum matters most to learn. Chapter 5 covers inclusion, and you'll build your planning skills for it in Module 4 of this course.
The age range of who counts as a "student" has widened in both directions. Half or more of three- and four-year-olds attend some form of preschool or full-time child care in many countries (National Institute for Early Education Research, 2006). On the other end, many adults take courses well into adulthood at workplaces, public high schools, community colleges, and universities. Some adult students complete high-school credentials they missed earlier. Others pursue trade-related skills with narrow, focused goals.
Adult students bring life experiences that motivate learning, and they bring constraints (parenting, full-time work) that compete for study time and make them impatient with teaching that is irrelevant to their goals. Your high-school students will carry a version of the same impatience: they'll judge their time in your room against the goals they care about. For secondary teachers, the advice is to ask often how you respect students' time in the lesson and how you make the work efficient, effective, and worth showing up for.
Seifert and Sutton point out culture and language are connected but not identical. Students from a single language group can come from cultural backgrounds with little in common, and students who share a culture may speak different languages. For your teaching, the lesson is to learn about the specific students in your room instead of relying on broad assumptions tied to a single label. You'll find concrete moves in Chapter 4. For now, you can notice your own assumptions about who learns how and keep those assumptions in view as you plan.
When you read a list like this one, you may be tempted to translate diversity into "more work." Seifert and Sutton push back on the frame. In their view, diversity describes the students you're designing every lesson for, so it's part of the job from the first day.
For most teachers, technology means computers and the internet as resources for teaching and learning. The tools have expanded the amount and range of information available to students, even if the benefits have sometimes been overstated in media reports (Cuban, 2001). With the internet, students can access up-to-date information on almost any subject, often with images, video, and audio. You can see the promise on the page, and you can also see the gap between the promise and what most classrooms look like in practice.
Teachers have had a harder time folding technology into their practice than the marketing suggests (Haertel & Means, 2003). Many classrooms still have only one or two computers. Many schools have limited internet bandwidth. Waiting for a turn at a computer or arranging a trip to the lab limits how much students use the tools, no matter how valuable the tools could be. In single-computer classrooms, the device often functions in traditional ways: a fancy typewriter, a digital reference book, a supplementary station for the early finisher.
Even with a single computer, you have new possibilities. The device can present upcoming assignments to small groups, offer flexibility about when students start or finish tasks, enrich the learning of students with special interests, and provide review for students who need extra help. The moves are small, and together they shift the teacher's role in a useful direction: away from being the sole source of information and toward being a guide who helps students build understanding. With more computers in the room, the shift gets easier. The teacher can spend more time helping individuals plan and execute, more time supporting students with special learning needs, and less time delivering content the students could find for themselves.
Technology also brings costs that show up on the budget line. Equipping classrooms is expensive, and the money sometimes comes out of other budgets that matter, like staff or books. Other costs are subtler. Students need help sorting trustworthy information from junk, and teaching them to sort sources is hard even for experienced teachers (Seiter, 2005). Some kinds of learning don't work on a computer (sports, driver education, choral practice). As a new teacher, you'll need to assess what technologies are possible in your specific room and which ones help students learn, and you should expect your choices to change how you work with students.
The public and its leaders expect more and more accountability from teachers and students for their work. Schools and teachers are held responsible for implementing particular curricula and goals. Students are held responsible for learning particular knowledge. The trend has raised legal requirements for becoming and staying certified as a teacher. Preservice teachers in the U.S. now take more subject-area and education-related courses, spend more time student teaching, and pass examinations of subject-matter and pedagogical knowledge. The specifics vary by region, but the general direction is the same in the English-speaking world: more requirements, higher levels.
Accountability has also pushed the use of high-stakes tests, which are administered to all students in a district or region and carry consequences for further education (Fuhrman & Elmore, 2004). High-stakes tests influence course grades, determine whether a student graduates, and decide whether students continue to the next level. They mix essay items with structured-response items like multiple choice, and they raise hard questions about what teachers should teach, how teachers should help students prepare, and whether the tests are fair to all students. Because schools often use the results to evaluate teacher, school, and district performance as well, student success on the tests becomes a daily concern in instructional decisions. Chapter 12 covers the purpose, nature, and effects of high-stakes tests in detail.
The first three trends contribute to the fourth. By most definitions, an occupation is a profession if its members take personal responsibility for the quality of their work, hold each other accountable for the quality, and require special training to practice. By this definition, teaching has become more professional than in the past (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005). Increased expectations of student achievement carry increased responsibility for teachers' own development. Becoming a new teacher requires more specialized work than in the past, in part as a response to the complexities of diversity and technology.
Professionalism has also been pushed from inside the profession. Teachers study and improve their own practice through action research (sometimes called teacher research), a form of investigation about their own students and their own teaching. Through action research, teachers make concrete decisions that improve teaching and learning in particular contexts (Mertler, 2006; Stringer, 2004). Action research can take many forms: tracking one student's reading progress across a semester, comparing student responses to open-ended versus closed questions in social studies, examining student artwork for signs of creative risk-taking before and after explicit encouragement.
You can pick one question about your residency you don't have an answer to. In your next planning period, sketch a small action-research design that could give you a partial answer in two weeks. The sketch is a way to see the question is researchable and you're the one who can research it.
At the end of the chapter, Seifert and Sutton look ahead. You'll meet each of the four trends again in later chapters, with practical handles. Diversity is the long thread of Chapters 4 and 5 (covered in Module 4). Technology comes up throughout the planning chapters in Module 2. Accountability is the central concern of the assessment chapters in Module 3. Professionalism comes up throughout the rest of the book.
Before you write your first set of classroom rules or draw your first seating chart, name what you think a teacher is for, in specific words. Then test the words against the four trends. The trend that pulls hardest on your stated purpose is the best candidate for your attention in your first year. You can give the trend you named your attention while you keep the other three in view.
The four pulls that drew you into teaching (vocation, content, young people, practical features) interact with the four trends. A teacher whose dominant pull is intellectual interest in content and whose dominant trend is accountability will read the test-prep pressure differently than a teacher whose dominant pull is working with young people. Both readings can be defensible. If you know which reading is yours, you won't assume every teacher's job description matches your own.
Before you read further, write down three forces besides "I love kids" that pulled you into teaching. Then click Show answer to compare your list with this course's four pulls.
In Discussion 1, you'll introduce yourself and name one professional goal for the term, using the chapter's four trends and this course's four pulls. Which of the four pulls drew you in with the most force? Which of the four trends does your goal belong to, and why did you choose it? The cohort hears better goals when each person can name the pull and the trend the goal addresses.
Open the Discussion 1 promptCan you write three sentences about your teaching? In the first, explain why you went into teaching in language a fifteen-year-old would understand. In the second, name the trend your first sentence suggests you care about most. In the third, name a move you can make this week to act on the trend.
Seifert opens Chapter 2 with a story about his son Michael at age three. Dad pours water from a tall glass into a wide pie plate and asks Michael whether the amount of water has changed. Michael says yes, there is less now. Dad explains that the amount stayed the same. Michael agrees to be polite, then by the end of the demonstration insists again that pouring made the water less. Dad runs the same demo every year. Michael fails it every year, until age six, when he greets dad with a question of his own: "Are you going to ask me about the water again? Because I know the amount stays the same. Do you want me to fake it for your students?"
Seifert uses the story to set up the chapter's working definition of learning: a relatively permanent change in behavior, skills, knowledge, or attitudes resulting from identifiable psychological or social experiences. The key word is permanent, because a change that disappears the moment after it happens doesn't count. From there, Seifert and Sutton build out the educational psychology teachers use to describe and influence learning in all of its forms: behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional.
On this tab, you'll work through the chapter in eight sections: what learning is and is not, how teachers' priorities shape what gets called learning in school, behaviorism in two sections (classical and operant), psychological constructivism (Piaget), social constructivism (Vygotsky and Bruner), a side-by-side comparison of the lenses, and what the three theoretical traditions imply for your Module 1 management work.
Seifert and Sutton push back on the casual use of the word "learning." A temporary change doesn't count as learning: if you forget a phone number the moment after dialing, you didn't learn it, and if you eat vegetables only when forced, you didn't learn to eat them. At the same time, the authors are generous about what kinds of change qualify. Learning can be physical (riding a bicycle, throwing a ball), social (figuring out a friend's personality), or emotional (coming to like, or dislike, a person), as well as cognitive. Sneezing when you catch a cold is a reflex and doesn't count as learning. Many of the skills, attitudes, and habits you learn fall outside academics.
When you ask whether a student "learned" something, you're asking whether the change lasts, which is a harder question than whether they performed it once. A correct answer on a Friday quiz that disappears by the following Tuesday is performance that didn't become learning. A new procedure students follow under teacher prompting and drop the moment the prompt goes away is compliance that didn't become learning. You'll see the distinction again in every assessment chapter you read in this course.
Seifert and Sutton use permanence as the test for learning. Performance is what a student does in the moment, and learning is what the student can still do, or still believe, or still attempt, three weeks later when nobody is watching. Most of the chapter, and most of the rest of educational psychology, is an attempt to explain how performance becomes learning.
Teachers' definitions of learning differ a little from definitions used by everyone else, and the differences come from the realities of running a classroom. Seifert and Sutton highlight three priorities that shape how teachers think about learning, often without the teachers naming them.
Teachers tend to equate learning with what schools teach on purpose: language, mathematics, the formal curriculum, and the routines that make a classroom run. Teachers know learning happens elsewhere too, and they're responsible for specific content and skills, so the responsibility shapes what counts. As a side effect, learning outside the curriculum often gets reframed as "behavior" or "social skills," which the teacher must manage instead of teach.
The second priority is educational readiness. The term used to mean whether a student was prepared to cope with school's activities and expectations. The kindergarten child who can take care of personal needs, hold a pencil, and use a five-thousand-word vocabulary is ready to start (Copple & Bredekamp, 2006). At higher grades the term shifts to prerequisites: the algebra needed before physics, the field experience needed before a teaching license. Seifert and Sutton note a second meaning teachers often miss: schools and teachers are also responsible for being ready for their students. If five-year-olds need to play and move, kindergarten teachers are responsible for planning rooms that allow play and movement.
Transfer is the ability to use knowledge or a skill outside the situation where you learned it. Schools justify teaching reading and arithmetic in elementary school in large part because students will use the skills outside the classroom. Seifert and Sutton call transfer a gold standard of teaching. Most teachers seek it, and none of us provide it all the time. You'll design for transfer again in Module 2 (lesson planning) and Module 3 (assessment).
The three priorities have one more implication: what gets taught isn't always what gets learned. Assigning a reading on the Russian Revolution doesn't guarantee every student read it, and reading it doesn't guarantee every student understood it. Teachers can't assume the two are the same. The rest of the textbook (and most of this course) is a set of strategies for turning more of your teaching into learning.
Section 3Behaviorism is a perspective on learning that focuses on changes in observable behavior. Seifert and Sutton are careful not to oversell it as the only useful lens. Behaviorism is most useful for identifying relationships between specific actions by a student and the immediate precursors and consequences of those actions. It's less useful for understanding changes in students' thinking, which is where cognitive theories come in. The authors divide the behaviorist tradition into two models: respondent (classical) conditioning and operant conditioning.
Classical conditioning is built on involuntary responses to specific sights, sounds, or sensations. When a doctor approaches with an injection, you cringe and tighten your muscles. When a contented baby smiles at you, you smile back. You can't help yourself. The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (1927) ran systematic studies of involuntary stimuli and responses using dogs. He attached a tube to measure the dogs' salivation when fed. As the experiment ran, the dogs began salivating before they tasted food, sometimes before they even saw the food, as soon as Pavlov entered the room. The sight of the experimenter, neutral at first, had become associated with the dogs' original salivation response.
Psychologists named this process respondent conditioning because it describes changes in responses to stimuli. Each piece of the process gets a label. Imagine a dog (or one of Seifert's, named Ginger) before any conditioning. Ginger salivates (an unconditioned response, or UR) only when she tastes her dinner (the unconditioned stimulus, or US). Over time a neutral stimulus, the sound of opening a bag of fresh dog food, gets paired with the eating experience. In time, the neutral stimulus alone elicits salivation, even when the bag is empty. The neutral stimulus is now the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the response is renamed the conditioned response (CR).
You might dismiss Pavlov's dogs as a curiosity, but Seifert and Sutton find classical conditioning everywhere in classrooms, most of all in students' attitudes and feelings about school. Consider a student who smiles when meeting a warm, friendly person. The teacher in question (you) is the unconditioned stimulus. Your smile elicits the student's smile, which is the unconditioned response. If you pair the smile with the classroom enough times, the classroom itself becomes a conditioned stimulus. In time, the student walks in and feels happy, even before you say anything. The student has learned to like being in your room.
The same mechanism works in reverse with a teacher Seifert calls Mr. Horrible. Mr. Horrible scowls at the student, and the unconditioned response is cringing, wide eyes, and a racing heart. If he pairs the scowls with the classroom enough times, the room itself becomes a conditioned stimulus, and the student feels apprehensive walking in, even on days Mr. Horrible is absent. Any stimulus that starts out neutral can acquire the power to elicit a response if it gets paired with an unconditioned stimulus often enough, and your room is no exception.
You need three more ideas to complete the picture of classical conditioning, and you'll see each one in your classroom whether you call it by name or not.
Extinction is the disappearance of a learned association when the conditioned stimulus stops being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. If you leave the classroom mid-year and a less-expressive substitute arrives, the student's smiles at the room itself will fade, and the original learning is "unlearned." Extinction also happens to negative associations: if Mr. Horrible leaves, the student's cringing in the room will fade in time. Extinction takes weeks, and a busy teacher may miss the slow fade because too many other things compete for attention.
Generalization is the tendency for similar stimuli to elicit a conditioned response. When Pavlov paired a particular bell with food, his dogs salivated to the bell, then also (somewhat) to other bells with different pitches. The student who learns to associate your smile with your classroom may also feel happy in similar classrooms with other warm teachers. Through generalization, students can learn to "like school" as a whole. Negative associations can generalize too, though: a student who learns to fear Mr. Horrible's room may walk into other classrooms tense.
Discrimination is the opposite of generalization. The learner notices that some stimuli that look similar to the conditioned stimulus don't predict the unconditioned stimulus, and stops responding to those. The student who has multiple teachers across the day may smile in your room and not in Mr. Horrible's. With discrimination, the student doesn't generalize fear of one room to all rooms, though positive associations spread less too. Seifert and Sutton note even imperfect discrimination is better in most cases than a generalized dislike of school.
In operant conditioning, the focus moves from the stimulus that triggers a response to the consequence that follows a behavior. Behind the model is the idea that certain consequences make certain behaviors happen more often. If you compliment a student for a good comment in discussion, you raise the chance of more comments later. If classmates laugh at a joke, the joke-teller will tell more jokes. The original research belongs to B. F. Skinner (1938, 1948, 1988), who studied lab rats in cages with a lever and a food tray (the famous "Skinner box"). At first the rat sniffs around at random. Sooner or later it presses the lever, a food pellet drops, and the rat eats. Over time, the rat spends more time near the lever, presses it more often, and eats more. Skinner called the food the reinforcement and the lever press the operant, because pressing the lever operated on the environment.
The operant is the behavior whose frequency is being shaped. It can be anything the learner does on purpose: pressing a lever, raising a hand, completing a worksheet, calling out an answer, or putting a phone in a pocket.
Reinforcement is the consequence that follows the operant and increases its frequency. Positive reinforcement adds something the learner wants (praise, points, food). Negative reinforcement removes something unpleasant (a homework assignment, a hard task). Both raise the rate of the behavior.
A schedule is the pattern by which reinforcement follows the operant. On a continuous schedule, every instance is reinforced, and on an intermittent schedule, only some are. Behavior on an intermittent schedule takes longer to learn and lasts longer once learned. Most classroom reinforcement is intermittent because no teacher can compliment every correct answer.
A cue is a stimulus that signals reinforcement is available if the operant happens now. Skinner's rats were cued by a small light: lever pressing was reinforced when the light was on, not when it was off. Classroom cues include calling on a student (signaling that contributing now will be acknowledged) and posted procedures (signaling that following the routine now is recognized).
Classroom examples are easy to find once you know what you're looking for. A seventh-grade boy makes a silly face (the operant) and classmates giggle (the reinforcement); he makes more silly faces. A student raises her hand and gets called on with a thoughtful follow-up question (the reinforcement); she raises her hand more often. A student turns in homework on time and finds a positive comment in the margin (the reinforcement); on-time submissions go up. The same logic explains behaviors you don't want. A student calls out an answer without raising a hand and gets the social reward of being heard (the reinforcement); calling out increases. A student avoids a hard problem and the teacher, without comment, gives them an easier one (negative reinforcement: the hard problem went away); the avoidance behavior strengthens.
Seifert and Sutton compare classical and operant conditioning with care. Both can show extinction, generalization, and discrimination. Both involve schedules. The difference is what is being changed: an involuntary response in classical conditioning, a voluntary behavior in operant conditioning. The two together explain a great deal of classroom behavior, including most of the work of Marzano Chapter 8 in this module on rules and procedures, and Skinner's behavior modification in the Seifert Ch 7 tab.
Behaviorism is a powerful descriptive lens, and it's incomplete. It can't explain why students think what they think, how they understand a concept, or what they bring to your room from home and culture. If you use behaviorism alone, you'll get compliant students who can't transfer learning. Paired with the constructivist lenses below, behaviorism explains more of what your students do.
Constructivists ask what students think instead of what they do. Their core claim is students build (or "construct") knowledge out of experiences instead of absorbing it from a teacher. Constructivist models of learning differ about how much a learner builds knowledge on their own and how much help comes from people with more expertise. Seifert and Sutton call the two strands psychological constructivism and social constructivism. Both strands are about how individuals think, and they differ on how much help the learner gets.
The most famous psychological constructivist is Jean Piaget (Piaget, 2001; Gruber & Voneche, 1995). Piaget described learning as the interplay between two mental moves: assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation is interpreting new information with the concepts you already have. A preschool child who has learned "bird" might at first label any flying object with the word: butterflies, mosquitoes, even airplanes. The child is fitting the new experience into the existing schema for "bird." Assimilation is comfortable, because the learner doesn't have to change anything inside.
Accommodation is revising or modifying your existing concepts when new information doesn't fit. In time, the preschooler revises "bird" to include only specific kinds of flying creatures, and butterflies, mosquitoes, and airplanes each get a different word. The schema for "bird" gets sharper. Accommodation is the harder move because it requires changing what you already think.
Piaget called the balance between assimilation and accommodation cognitive equilibrium. In equilibrium, a learner can handle most situations with prior knowledge and makes small revisions when new experiences call for them. Disequilibrium happens when too much information won't fit and the schema must change. Good teaching tends to produce small, productive bursts of disequilibrium followed by accommodation.
A schema is the elaborated mixture of vocabulary, actions, and experience a learner has built around a concept, which makes it deeper than a definition. A child's schema for "bird" includes the word, the experience of seeing birds, the sound a bird makes, the feeling of feeding a duck, the picture in a storybook. Learning, in Piaget's account, is the gradual revision and addition of schemata across all of those dimensions.
Piaget's picture is individualistic by design. Parents and teachers stay on the sidelines most of the time while the learner figures things out. He acknowledged a role for adult support and called it social transmission, but he didn't emphasize it. He was more interested in what children figured out on their own than in how teachers might help them, so his theory is often classified more as a theory of development (long-term change across childhood) than as a theory of learning. Educators have found his framework most useful for thinking about students' readiness to learn.
Section 6Social constructivism is the second strand. Where Piaget asked what learners build on their own, Vygotsky and Bruner asked what learners build with help. The American psychologist Jerome Bruner (1960, 1966, 1996) argued that students could learn more than tradition suggested as long as they received the right guidance and resources. He called the support instructional scaffolding, after the temporary frame builders use while a permanent structure goes up. His most quoted (and most disputed) line is a claim that any subject can be taught effectively, in some intellectually honest form, to any child at any stage of development. The claim depends on the scaffolding being right.
The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) developed similar ideas on his own. He proposed that a learner can perform better with help from someone more capable than they can perform alone. The space between solo performance and assisted performance is what Vygotsky called the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD. The ZPD is the figurative place where learning happens. Outside it on one side, the task is too easy and the learner is bored. Outside it on the other side, the task is too hard and the learner gives up. Inside it, with the right help, the learner can do today what they can't do alone, and tomorrow they may be able to do it without help.
Vygotsky's ZPD is the most useful diagnostic tool in this chapter. When a lesson stalls, ask whether the task is in the student's ZPD and whether the scaffold matches, instead of asking whether the student is smart enough. If the task is outside the ZPD, more effort from the student won't produce progress, and if the task is inside the ZPD without the right scaffold, the student will stall there too. In both cases, you change the task or the scaffold instead of questioning the student's ability.
Both versions of constructivism (psychological and social) describe novices "being allowed to learn" rather than "being taught." The social version places more weight on the responsibility of the more-knowledgeable other (the teacher, the older sibling, the more experienced peer) for arranging experiences that make learning possible. The more-knowledgeable other's job sounds a lot like a classroom teacher's job: knowing the content, breaking it into manageable parts, sequencing the parts, providing successful practice, bringing the parts back together, and connecting the whole experience to what the learner already knows. Seifert acknowledges the list makes teaching a demanding job.
Section 7You'll work with all three lenses in one classroom, and you'll draw on all of them in most lessons. You reinforce desired behaviors (behaviorism), you organize content for the learner's existing schemata (psychological constructivism), and you scaffold tasks inside the ZPD (social constructivism). The useful question is which theory diagnoses the moment in front of you.
Tap a card to flip it. The front names the theorist, and the back sums up the theorist's contribution. You can use the cards as a quick reference when you place a classroom moment inside a learning theory.
Click two tiles to turn them over. When the theorist matches the idea, the pair stays open, and the goal is to clear the board in as few moves as you can.
For Module 1, the chapter's most useful lesson is to name the moves you're already making. A bell-and-routine system is behaviorist at its core, with classical conditioning built into the entry routine and operant conditioning built into the acknowledgment moves. A class meeting where students debate a rule is constructivist, with both Piaget (each student fitting the rule into their own schema) and Vygotsky (the discussion shifting each student's thinking through the contributions of others) at work. A thinking routine in which students surface what they already know about a topic before reading leans toward Piaget, and a peer-tutoring routine that pairs strong and emerging readers leans toward Vygotsky.
For Discussion 2 in week two, you'll name the theory behind a specific management decision you observed or made and explain how the two connect. In the Interdisciplinary Activity, you'll use social constructivism: you pair students across content strengths so each one works in a ZPD where a partner can help.
Think of one student from your residency. What did the student do this week that fits a behaviorist account, what fits a Piagetian account, and what fits a Vygotskian account? If you can't find one of the three, watch for the missing one tomorrow.
Seifert and Sutton lay out the three learning theories in Chapter 2. In Module 2, you'll carry them into lesson design with the Bloom's pyramid explorer and the lesson types from Marzano Chapters 3 to 7. When you pair the theories with the explorer, you can see what kind of cognitive work students do in each lesson.
Think of one student from your residency. Which of the three theories (behaviorism, psychological constructivism, social constructivism) explains the most about how the student learns?
You'll use three theories in one classroom. You draw from all three in most lessons (you reinforce, you organize knowledge, you let students build), and the question is which lens diagnoses a stuck moment.
Seifert and Sutton open Chapter 7 with two journal entries from Kelvin Seifert, one of the authors. The first entry is from his early years teaching primary grades, and the second is from years later, teaching high-school math. Seifert found the same logic underneath both rooms, both age groups, and both sets of management problems. Seifert and Sutton separate management from discipline. Discipline is the response after a behavior happens. Management is everything you do ahead of time to make the behavior less likely. The authors organize Chapter 7 around prevention first and response second.
Prevention work is hard to see, because a well-managed room looks like a room where nothing is going wrong, and a visitor can't learn much about the teacher's methods from watching a calm room. In Chapter 7, Seifert and Sutton name the moves so you can see them: visibility, procedures, rules, pacing, withitness, feedback, and communication with families. By the end of the chapter, you should be able to walk into any classroom and name three things the teacher is doing to make the room run, even if the teacher couldn't name them herself.
On this tab, you'll work through the chapter in nine sections: why management comes first, arranging the physical environment, establishing procedures and routines (with the CHAMPS field-builder you can use to plan your own), writing classroom rules, pacing and structuring lessons, withitness and the flow of activities, feedback, records, and communication with families, the major management theories on a continuum from external control to self-management, and what the chapter means for your practice.
Managing the learning environment is both a major responsibility and an ongoing concern for every teacher. Students who don't feel oriented, safe, and busy in your room will produce the symptoms (off-task talking, disruptions, side conversations, refusal) no lesson plan can cure. When you write a lesson plan, you assume the room is already running, and management is the work of getting it there.
Management is harder than it looks, in part because a teacher can't predict everything that happens in a room of twenty-five distinct people, each with a history, a mood, and a body that wakes up at a different time. Seifert and Sutton are honest about the surprises: you'll have them, and often. With good management, you'll have fewer surprises and a stable platform to respond from when one comes.
Management is also hard for a structural reason. Public schooling is, at its core, a public-funded service institution. People who never saw your students made many of the decisions about your room: state legislators, district administrators, building principals, department chairs. You don't get to set the class size, the schedule structure, the available furniture, or even the temperature of the room. You start with the realities you can't change and manage inside them. Seifert and Sutton respect the structural constraints and refuse to use them as excuses.
Discipline is what you do after a behavior, and management is what you build so the behavior is less likely. Seifert and Sutton give prevention about twice the space they give responses: pages 140 to 150 of Chapter 7 cover prevention, and pages 150 to 155 cover responding to misbehavior.
Seifert and Sutton start their concrete advice with the physical room, and they build the discussion on two principles. The first is visibility: you should be able to see all students from every spot where you teach, and any student should be able to see the board and you. The second is traffic: high-use zones (the door, the pencil sharpener, your desk, the recycling bin) should be clear and the routes between them should not cross each other.
You need sight lines in both directions. You should be able to scan the entire room without turning your head more than ninety degrees from your usual teaching spot. Every student should be able to see the board and your face from their assigned seat without leaning. If a student has to lean to see, change the seating chart.
High-use zones (door, pencil sharpener, materials shelf, your desk) should be clear of obstacles and not on top of each other. Routes between high-use zones should not cross student work areas, so a student on the way to the pencil sharpener doesn't walk through a group at work.
Students should be able to reach the materials they use most without help from you, and you can store the rest farther away. When you label and organize materials so any student can find them, the labels work as a procedure without words. Students who can serve themselves don't interrupt the lesson.
You can arrange desks in rows when you plan direct instruction, because rows let every student face the teacher and the board. You can arrange desks in pods of three or four when you plan cooperative learning, because pods give students shared workspace and natural sight lines for group talk. You can arrange desks in a horseshoe when you plan whole-class discussion, because a horseshoe lets every student see and respond to every other student. Seifert and Sutton recommend choosing a default arrangement for your most common activity and rehearsing the transitions students will use when the activity changes, so the transition itself becomes a procedure students learn.
Some teachers don't have full control over the room layout. They share spaces with other teachers, work in older buildings with bolted-down furniture, or run on a schedule that requires resetting the room every period. Seifert and Sutton are realistic about these constraints and suggest you plan inside what you can change. Even moving the teacher's desk into a corner so it doesn't block sight lines is a layout decision worth making.
Section 3Procedures and routines are specific ways of doing common, repeated classroom tasks: entering the room, sharpening a pencil, turning in homework, asking for help during silent work, and leaving for the bathroom. Without a procedure, each small task becomes a nine-second interruption that happens forty times a day. Seifert and Sutton make a direct point: procedures keep activities moving, and they also teach students how the class runs, so it can run without constant teacher intervention.
Seifert and Sutton distinguish procedures from rules. A procedure is the way you do a thing, and a rule is a standard of behavior. "Hand in homework in the blue tray on the back counter" is a procedure. "We treat each other with respect" is a rule. The two work together: a procedure makes most rules livable, and most procedures work only in a room that has agreed on a set of rules.
Seifert and Sutton describe two approaches: some teachers announce procedures, and others invite students to help write them. Whichever you choose, you'll get better results if you teach the procedure instead of announcing it once. Most new teachers tell students how to do something once on day one and then find students ignoring it on day three. The fix is to teach the procedure the same way you teach content: model it, have students rehearse it, give feedback, reteach the parts that broke down. Plan to spend ten minutes a day in the first week of school teaching procedures out loud and on purpose. The ten minutes feel expensive in the first week, and they save you time for the rest of the year.
The most common first-week mistake is announcing procedures instead of teaching them. Students nod along and then forget the procedure by the next class. Instead, you can model the procedure, have students rehearse it, give feedback, and reteach it on day two. By the end of week one, students should be able to run the procedures without prompting.
Sprick's CHAMPS framework names six dimensions every classroom procedure should answer. You can draft your version for one specific activity (small-group work, silent reading, lab setup, whatever you teach). Your browser saves the draft on this device only, and you can print it when you have a version you like.
Rules express standards of behavior students need to take individual responsibility for. Seifert and Sutton are careful about how many rules you write and how you phrase them, and they offer three principles for writing rules.
You can set four to six rules total. When you post a list of twelve rules, students can tell none of them will be enforced. Students can't remember twelve rules, teachers can't enforce twelve rules every day, and visitors to the room can't tell which rules matter. Four to six rules is enough, and you can group everything else under procedures.
"We listen when others speak" is a stronger rule than "Don't interrupt." The positive frame names the behavior you want students to start. The negative frame names the behavior you want them to stop, which is often vaguer and points students toward what you don't want.
"We respect each other" sounds wholesome and is almost impossible to enforce. "We use names, listen without interrupting, and keep our hands and materials to ourselves" is enforceable and teachable. Seifert and Sutton recommend the second kind.
Like procedures, rules can be set by the teacher alone or co-developed with students. Both approaches have research support. Seifert and Sutton recommend a hybrid for new teachers: post a set of three to five rules on day one with the consequences for breaking them, then on day two or three open the floor to revise. Students see the rules in action before they vote, and their revisions come out better than a set written from scratch.
Section 5One of the most useful preventive moves is pacing. In a well-paced lesson, students stay busy thinking, and off-task behavior costs effort. In a lesson with bad pacing, with too much downtime or too little, off-task behavior becomes the easiest choice. Seifert and Sutton cover three sub-topics: choosing tasks at appropriate difficulty, providing moderate structure, and managing the gaps between activities.
Students engage when tasks are challenging enough to require thought but achievable enough to produce success. Seifert and Sutton draw on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development from Chapter 2: tasks inside the ZPD with the right scaffold produce learning. Tasks outside the ZPD on the easy side produce boredom; tasks outside on the hard side produce shutdown. Sequencing instruction is part of the answer (you start where students are and build from there). The rest is adjusting the difficulty within a task in real time. If you watch a strong teacher, you'll see them add a hint for one student and take one away from another, often in the same minute.
Too little structure leaves students lost, and too much leaves them passive. Seifert and Sutton pick a middle with enough clarity for students to begin and enough open space for them to think. A graphic organizer with three blanks and an example is moderate structure. A worksheet with thirty fill-in items is too much, and a blank sheet of paper with a vague prompt is too little. As you watch students work, you can add or remove structure.
Off-task behavior clusters in the transitions between activities. Seifert and Sutton prescribe two strategies. The first is to compress the gap: have materials ready, give one clear cue, and signal the next activity in plain language. The second is to make the transition itself a rehearsed procedure. Students learn the move from desks to lab tables the same way they learn how to enter the room. You spend a week of practice on it and save time every period for the rest of the year.
Jacob Kounin's research on classroom management in the 1970s produced three terms teachers still use, and Seifert and Sutton use all three. Withitness is the teacher's awareness of everything happening in the room at once. Overlapping is the ability to do two things at once, like conferring with one student while scanning the rest of the room. The ripple effect is the observation that one off-task student left alone affects the students around her, which affects the students around them, until the room is unsettled.
Withitness begins with perception, and students see it in how you respond. Where are you standing? Who do you have line-of-sight to? When was the last time you scanned the back row? Teachers build the skill through practice, and it grows fastest in teachers who choose positions where they can see the most students from one spot. When you walk the room while teaching, sometimes called "withitness in motion," you widen your field of view.
Overlapping is harder because the teacher has to manage cognitive load. Seifert and Sutton offer a trick: while you confer with one student, make a habit of looking up every fifteen seconds and saying something out loud about another part of the room. "Marcus, eyes on your work, please. Now, Tanya, you were saying..." The acknowledgment does two jobs: you redirect Marcus, and the rest of the class learns you're still watching them.
Small responses pay off because of the ripple effect. A small redirect ("Marcus, eyes on the page") costs less than a full intervention five minutes later when the original off-task behavior has spread. Kounin's data showed teachers who responded early and in proportion to the behavior had fewer escalations than teachers who waited until the issue was big enough to require a big response. For new teachers, the advice is to respond early with the smallest move that works, because small corrections add up to a calmer room.
For one week, you can count how many seconds pass between your scans of the room. If the gap is more than thirty seconds, parts of the room, often the back row, go unwatched for too long. Make a habit of scanning every ten to fifteen seconds while you teach, even when you're talking with one student, and the scanning will get easier with practice.
Seifert and Sutton close their list of preventive moves with three tools, and feedback comes first. Feedback means responses to students about their behavior or performance. Seifert and Sutton apply the same principle to behavioral feedback as to academic feedback: feedback works best when it's timely. A score on a test is more informative the day after the test than six weeks later. A comment about an off-task behavior carries more weight at the moment the behavior occurs than at the end of the period when both you and the student have forgotten the specifics. The same applies to positive feedback: a compliment delivered in the moment means more than one delivered in the abstract at the end of the week.
Timely feedback depends on accurate records. Seifert and Sutton recommend organizing your gradebook, your behavior log, and your contact log so you can find the information when you need it. Computer programs help, and so do simple paper systems. Whatever you choose, test it: when a parent calls, can you find a student's last three weeks of work and behavior in under two minutes? If you can't, simplify the system.
Communication with parents and caregivers is the last preventive tool in the chapter. Parents send their children to school every weekday morning, and they have a right to know how their children are doing. Seifert and Sutton describe three common channels: the regular classroom newsletter (written, asynchronous, low-effort), the phone call (real-time, two-way, higher effort), and the parent-teacher conference (in-person, scheduled, the highest investment). Each channel has trade-offs. New teachers should aim for at least one positive contact per family by the end of week three, so the first time a parent hears from you isn't about a problem.
Section 8Seifert and Sutton don't survey the classroom-management models, so you'll take a tour of them here, arranged on a continuum from external control to self-management. Each theorist makes different assumptions about why students misbehave and what you should do about it, and good teachers borrow from several models depending on the situation.
Maslow is at the self-management end. In his hierarchy of needs, students can't focus on academic work until basic physiological, safety, and belonging needs are met. In classroom terms, a student's physical needs and sense of safety come before any behavior plan or lesson. A student who feels unsafe in your room can't take the academic risks learning requires.
Basic needs come before learning, and the pyramid below fills in from the bottom up.
Glasser's choice theory is next on the continuum. Glasser argued all behavior is chosen, even behavior that looks compulsive, and students choose behaviors to meet basic psychological needs (belonging, power, fun, freedom, survival). The teacher's job is to help students see the choice and pick a behavior that meets the need without disrupting the class. In a Glasser behavior conference, the student names the unmet need and brainstorms an alternative behavior that would meet it.
Canter's assertive discipline is closer to the external-control end. Canter held teachers have a right and a responsibility to teach in a calm room, and students have a right and a responsibility to learn in one. Teachers using his model set clear, specific rules with consistent consequences. The tone is firm and respectful: the teacher applies the stated consequence without yelling, lecturing, or negotiating. In Canter's model, the teacher writes the rules and consequences into a classroom discipline plan and teaches the plan to students in the first days of school.
Skinner's behavior modification is at the external-control end. Teachers using the model apply operant-conditioning principles (Chapter 2) to shape behavior through reinforcement: rewards for desired behavior, withdrawal of attention from undesired behavior, and intermittent schedules of reinforcement to make the behavior last. Behavior modification is powerful and limited at the same time. It's excellent at producing observable behavior change and weaker at building the internalized values students keep after the reinforcement system is gone.
You can drag each teacher move into the management framework that explains it best. Some moves could fit more than one lens, so go with the closest match. When you're done, click Check to see how you did. To change an answer, drag the piece back to the bank.
If a student is hungry, anxious, or unsafe, the lesson you planned won't reach them. Across the four models, the useful habit is to use the model that diagnoses the student in front of you instead of committing to one model for your whole career. Maslow fits a student whose basic needs are unmet. Glasser fits a student whose behavior masks an unmet psychological need. Canter fits a moment when a student who knows the rules is testing them. Skinner fits when you need to shape a specific repeated behavior over time.
You'll use Chapter 7 in two specific ways for the Module 1 work. In the Classroom Layout Project, you'll sketch a room that supports visibility, traffic flow, materials access, and an arrangement matched to your most common activity. As you sketch, ask where transitions will happen and what the cue will be, where withitness will be hardest, and where the ripple will start if you miss it. Your sketch should reflect the chapter's frameworks even if you don't label them.
In the Classroom Rules Project, you'll write four to six rules with the procedure that makes each one livable. Pair each rule with its procedure now, while the chapter is fresh. Students can't practice a rule without a procedure, and you'll find an unpracticed rule hard to keep enforcing past week three. Write each rule in positive, observable, behavioral terms. Then, for each rule, name the procedure that operationalizes it: what students do, when they do it, where they do it, and how they know they've done it right.
Picture a first-year teacher you've watched. What did they do on day three that you wouldn't do?
Which classroom procedure (entry, transition, or end-of-class) will you teach step by step in the first week? Sketch it, and then write one sentence about how you'll know the procedure is working.
In the Classroom Rules Project, you'll write four to six rules and the procedure that makes each one livable. Pair each rule with its procedure now, while the chapter is fresh. Students can't practice a rule without a procedure, and you'll find an unpracticed rule hard to keep enforcing past week three.
Open the Classroom Rules Project briefIn the Classroom Layout Project, you'll sketch the room you can set up. Mark visibility (where you can stand and see everyone), traffic (high-use zones and the routes between them), and your default arrangement, then annotate the transition to your second arrangement and the cue you'll use for it.
Open the Classroom Layout Project briefSeifert and Sutton start Chapter 8 from a claim that sounds obvious until you think it through: everyone in a classroom is communicating all the time. The signals include words, silence, glances, posture, the angle of a teacher's body, the second of pause before a student answers, and the millisecond at which a teacher's mouth tightens. Teachers and students send thousands of signals per period. Students read most of them, and teachers send most of theirs without knowing.
Seifert and Sutton argue good teachers learn to notice the channels they didn't know they were using and to use them on purpose. They also argue the conventions for eye contact, wait time, and personal distance are cultural and vary from one community to another. When a teacher's conventions match the dominant culture, most students will read the teacher as intended, and the teacher will misread the rest. From the chapter, you'll get the language to notice the misreads and adjust before a misread becomes a relationship problem.
On this tab, you'll work through the chapter in seven sections: the three functions of classroom talk, the verbal and nonverbal channels (and the unintended one), strategies for effective content talk, strategies for effective nonverbal communication, the major structures of classroom participation, the cultural variation that runs through all of it, and what the chapter's framework means for the Module 1 work on rules and relationships.
Classrooms are different from other group settings because the talk in them serves a unique combination of functions. Seifert and Sutton name three functions, and each one has its own logic, its own conventions, and its own ways of going wrong.
Content talk is talk about the subject matter: explanations, demonstrations, questions, discussions, and the academic exchanges that produce learning. It's what most teachers think of when they imagine "teaching," and it's also the function students notice least, because they assume it's the default.
Procedural talk is talk about administrative rules and routines: "Take out your homework." "Write your name on the top right." "Turn this in by Friday." Procedural talk gets the class running. New teachers tend to do too much of it, and experienced teachers hand most of it off to posters, routines, and student leaders.
Control talk is aimed at preventing or correcting misbehavior: "Eyes up here." "Marcus, stop." Sometimes control talk is direct, and sometimes a teacher hides it inside a content question: "Jeremy, what did you think of the film?" can be a comprehension check or a redirect, and students know which one it is faster than the teacher does.
The functions overlap all the time, which is part of why classroom communication gets confusing. A single utterance ("Open your books to page forty-two") can be procedural (it instructs an action) and control (it ends a side conversation). A single question ("What did the protagonist want?") can be content (it teaches literary analysis) and control (you use it to pull a student back into the lesson). Seifert and Sutton want you to know which function you're using and to notice when one function is doing the work of another.
Section 2Seifert and Sutton's second framework is the distinction between verbal and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication is the words: spoken language, written language, anything that uses linguistic symbols to carry meaning. Nonverbal communication is everything else: gestures, posture, facial expression, eye contact, the distance between people, the loudness of a sigh. The two channels run side by side, both carry information, and they can contradict each other.
Teachers lean on the verbal channel because a classroom holds a diverse group of people who don't share much background. With explicit verbal instructions, the teacher clears up ambiguity a more homogeneous group could resolve from context. The reliance on words is part of why classrooms can feel formal compared to other group settings, and it's also why a teacher's nonverbal behaviors carry so much weight when they contradict the words. When the words and the nonverbal signals disagree, students tend to believe the nonverbal signals.
Seifert and Sutton add a third category, and it deserves more of your attention than its page count suggests: unintended communication, the messages a teacher sends without meaning to. Examples include the sigh after a student's wrong answer, the glance at the clock during a discussion, and the small lean toward the prepared student during cold call. Unintended messages come from the teacher's mood, energy, and prior interactions, with no malice or awareness behind them, and students read them with as much care as the intentional messages, sometimes more.
Students notice your nonverbal signals even when you don't. The fastest way to find your unintended channel is to record one of your own lessons and watch two minutes with the sound off. In the moment, you'll miss most of your own leans, sighs, and glances, including the look that tells students you're tired of the period, and your students will catch all of them.
Effective teachers combine all the forms of classroom talk to fit the moment. Seifert and Sutton give the most space to two clusters: content talk and procedural-or-control talk. The strategies for each come from research on how students attend to, retain, and respond to teacher language.
A few specific moves make the difference between content talk students follow and content talk they lose track of. You can learn each one, and you'll see each one on observation rubrics.
You open the lesson with a brief statement of what students will learn or do. Students who know where the lesson is headed can sort out what matters along the way. Stating the goal twice, at the open and at the close, works better than stating it once.
Students need at least one concrete example of every abstract concept before they use it. The example gives students a place to attach the concept, and without one, the concept stays abstract for them.
In the opening, you connect today's content to something students already know. The move takes ninety seconds, and it can save the lesson when the connection holds. When the connection is forced, students notice, and the lesson loses traction.
Every five to ten minutes, you pause the lesson for a quick check, so students can't fake-nod their way through it. A specific question with a specific answer tells you more than "any questions?" does.
Procedural and control talk should be brief, specific, and consistent. Seifert and Sutton offer a short set of moves for spending less airtime on management without losing its effect.
"Jamal, eyes on the page" is more useful than "Jamal, focus." The specific version names the behavior the student should produce. The vague version names a state the student is supposed to achieve, and "focus" is harder to operationalize than "eyes on the page." When you're specific, students also find it easier to comply, because they know what doing the right thing looks like.
The teacher moves toward the off-task student before saying anything. The shift in distance is a nonverbal cue. Most off-task students self-correct once the teacher's position shows them someone noticed. The teacher uses voice as the second move, when proximity doesn't produce the correction.
Your voice for control talk should sound like your voice for content. When control talk is heated, students learn off-task behavior gets them a show. When it's calm, students learn off-task behavior gets a small redirect while the lesson keeps going. You want the class to learn the second lesson.
When the student corrects the behavior, stop talking. Skip the lecture, the explanation of why the rule exists, and the demand for an apology, because the corrected behavior was the goal. If you keep going, the next correction gets harder, because the student remembers the first one as a punishment instead of a redirect.
Seifert and Sutton's discussion of nonverbal communication centers on three behaviors: eye contact, wait time, and social distance. Each one is a small cue students read with care, and each one varies across cultures.
Eye contact is the extent and timing of when a speaker looks at a listener and when they break the gaze. In conversations between equals, the speaker tends to look at the listener and the listener tends to look back, with brief breaks. In conversations between someone of greater authority and someone of lesser authority, the patterns can shift a great deal, and the cultural defaults vary. In some cultural communities, students look adults in the eye to show respect. In others, looking down or away is the respect signal. A teacher who treats one pattern as universal will read sustained eye contact as engagement and downcast eye contact as evasion, and will misread every student whose pattern differs.
Communication problems with eye contact come less from the looking itself than from differences in expectations about looking. The fix is to notice and remember each student's preferred pattern. Unwanted eye contact feels intrusive, and missed eye contact feels dismissive. Seifert and Sutton recommend keeping a small note for each student in the first weeks of school: their preferred pattern, the things that make them shut down, and the things that make them open up. The notes serve as a working memory aid.
Wait time is the pause between conversational turns. The classroom default in most U.S. schools is under one second. The research benchmark is three seconds (Mary Budd Rowe, 1972). Three seconds may not sound like much, but longer wait times produce longer student answers, more student-initiated questions, more student-to-student exchanges, fewer "I don't know" responses, and more participation from quiet students. Since the classroom default is under one second, count to three in your head before you call on anyone.
Wait time also varies across cultures. Some communities use overlapping speech where the listener begins responding before the speaker finishes, what the chapter calls negative wait time. Long pauses in those communities feel like hesitation or coldness. Other communities use long pauses as a sign of consideration; jumping in feels rude. A teacher whose default is one pattern needs to flex toward the other when a student's home pattern is different. Seifert and Sutton admit the flexing is hard, and they argue it's worth doing.
Social distance is the physical space between two people during interaction. Different distances signal different relationships. The intimate range (within eighteen inches) is reserved for close family or for moments of distress. The personal range (eighteen inches to four feet) is for friends and casual interaction. The social range (four to twelve feet) is the default for classroom small-group work. The public range (over twelve feet) is for whole-class instruction. Standing too close to a student during a normal interaction can feel intrusive. Standing too far during a small-group conferral can feel cold. As with eye contact and wait time, individuals and cultural communities vary in their preferences. Seifert and Sutton's advice is to notice, remember, and adjust.
You'll be tempted to assume your own conventions are universal. When your nonverbal defaults match the dominant culture of the school, most students will read you as you intend, and you'll misread the rest without seeing the misreads the students feel. You can keep your own defaults as long as you notice when a student's defaults differ and adjust your interpretation before you adjust your behavior.
You'll see patterns in many class activities: who talks when, who listens when, and what counts as participation. Seifert and Sutton call these patterns structures of participation. A small number of structures account for most of the activities in a typical classroom across a week, and each one shapes communication in a different way, with its own opportunities and risks.
In a lecture, the teacher talks and students listen. A lecture moves content fast and does little to engage each student. Seifert and Sutton describe Kelvin's lecture on children's play: he covered the material in twenty minutes, but few students lingered to discuss it. Lectures work in small doses paired with other structures and less well as the main mode.
In recitation, the teacher asks a question, one student answers, and the teacher evaluates the answer. The IRE pattern (initiation, response, evaluation) is the most common classroom dialogue. It's fast, the teacher keeps control, and most students stay silent. If you use it too much, students learn the teacher's voice is the only one that matters.
In a discussion, many students talk, and the teacher facilitates instead of evaluating each turn. Discussion produces deeper engagement and is harder to manage. A discussion protocol such as a Socratic seminar, a fishbowl, or four corners keeps loud students from drowning out quiet ones.
Students work together on a shared task, often without the teacher present at the conversation. Effective group work depends on positive interdependence (one student can't do the work alone) and individual accountability (each student's contribution is visible). Without both, one student often does the work while the rest copy.
In peer tutoring, one student teaches another. The tutor often learns more than the tutee, because explaining requires reorganizing knowledge. Peer tutoring works best when the tutor is one or two notches ahead of the tutee instead of far ahead. The Vygotsky-style ZPD logic from Chapter 2 explains why: the tutor pulls the tutee through the gap between alone-work and assisted-work, and the explaining itself moves the tutor up.
In independent work, students work alone with the teacher available for support. Pair the structure with check-ins, so no student spends fifteen minutes misunderstanding the task without anyone knowing. Seifert and Sutton recommend a brief mid-task pause to ask one student out loud what they're doing and why, because everyone else learns from the public answer.
In a well-designed lesson, the teacher rotates through three or four of these structures instead of staying in one. The variety holds attention, and students whose strengths fit different structures each get a turn to do well within a single period. Seifert and Sutton's strongest recommendation is to choose the structure that fits each lesson's objective instead of settling on one default structure for your career.
Section 6Culture comes up in every section above, because teachers who ignore it treat their own communication conventions as universal and then misdiagnose students whose conventions differ. Cultural variation shows up in eye contact patterns, in preferred wait times, in social distance norms, in the rules for when interrupting is rude and when it's engagement, and in how a student signals understanding without speaking.
Cultural variation is ordinary, and noticing it is different from stereotyping. Every cultural community includes a wide range of people, and individuals inside any community vary. Seifert and Sutton want you to notice and remember each student's preferences instead of predicting them from the student's background or assuming your own defaults work for everyone in the room.
The same advice applies beyond cultural background. Students with social anxiety, with autism, with ADHD, with hearing impairments, with English as a second language, and with any number of other individual variables will read and produce nonverbal cues in their own ways. Seifert and Sutton's advice stays the same: notice the variation, name it without judgment, and adjust your interpretation before you adjust your own behavior.
Section 7You'll use Chapter 8 in three specific ways for the Module 1 work. For Discussions 1 and 2, watch your own communication during the recording: where you look, when you pause, and what you do with your hands. Cohort feedback helps most when it focuses on the nonverbal channel you can't see in the moment. For the Classroom Rules Project, write each rule in the language students will hear, then write the nonverbal cue you'll pair with it. You reinforce a rule about raised hands by where you look when more than one hand goes up, and pairing verbal and nonverbal cues is the practical result of the chapter. For the Interdisciplinary Activity, watch how you set up the participation structure, because group work, discussion, peer tutoring, and lecture each carry different nonverbal demands.
For the first two weeks of school, Seifert and Sutton's most practical advice is to keep a small notes file on each student's preferred patterns: eye contact preferences, wait-time tolerance, whether overlapping speech feels like engagement or like rudeness, and whether the student wants you closer or farther away during a conference. You'll use the notes as a working memory aid to read students with more accuracy while the relationships are still forming.
Decide what you'd do at 2:47 p.m. on a Thursday, then check your answer against the chapter.
Think of a moment this week when you used wait time on purpose. Did the student's response change? Now think of a moment when your nonverbal channel sent a message your words didn't. What would the intentional version have looked like?
Scenarios. In the branching scenarios, you'll apply the management theories and communication patterns from Module 1 to classroom situations. Each scenario gives you a problem and two or three options, and you'll get feedback tied to the chapter material.
It's the second day of class. You spent yesterday introducing yourself and laying out four classroom rules. Today, two students are chatting out loud while you start the warm-up. The rest of the class is watching to see what you do.
What do you do?
Inside fifteen seconds, both students notice the silence and stop. The class settles. You pick the warm-up back up without saying a word about it.
You move beside their desks and keep teaching. The chatter dies. You finish the warm-up on time, and most of the class never sees the correction.
You name both students and tell them to be quiet. One rolls their eyes, and the energy in the room shifts. The other twenty-three students go very still.
You showed withitness without escalating, the move Marzano Ch 8 and Seifert Ch 7 describe. The rule was already set, and your silent reset reinforced it without damaging a relationship. The class saw the rule enforced without a confrontation.
Proximity works, and you held the lesson together. The two talkers got the message, but the rest of the class missed the chance to watch the rule hold. Next time, try the silent wait, so the whole room sees the rule enforced.
The talking stopped, and you lost some of the class's trust. Marzano Ch 9 (Building Relationships) explains the cost: a public correction in week one can set a tone that lasts all semester.
A student turns in a third late assignment. They aren't failing, but the pattern is starting to look like a habit. Three of your colleagues teach this student and have asked what your approach is. Which lens do you reach for first?
Which lens do you reach for first?
You apply the late penalty as written in the syllabus. The student takes the hit without comment.
You ask the student to stay for two minutes after class. They tell you they are working a closing shift four nights a week. How do you document the conversation?
You shift to a daily check-in points system for this assignment type. Submission rate goes up the next week.
In Glasser's choice theory, behavior is a choice. When you name the choice and the unmet need, you get further than a lecture about the rule would. With the conversation documented, you'll have a record and a starting point if the pattern continues.
You kept the standard in place, and Canter's approach works, but it won't tell you why the work is late. Skinner is right that contingencies shape behavior, and the risk is reinforcing compliance without addressing the underlying issue. Use either one alongside Glasser instead of in place of him.
It's week three. A parent emails to say their student "feels lost" in your class. You have grades and notes that suggest the student is doing fine but is quiet. The email is polite, a little tense, and asks for a meeting.
How do you respond?
You send a warm note with three grade entries and tell them their student is doing well. You hit send and move on.
You send the grade summary, name the concern, and offer two call windows this week. The parent picks one. What do you bring to the call?
You forward the email up the chain with a note asking for guidance. Your administrator replies a day later asking why you didn't answer the parent yourself.
You acknowledged the concern without minimizing it, and you opened the relational channel. With two grade samples and one observation, you gave the parent something concrete to take home.
Seifert Ch 8 (Classroom Communication) applies here: parents who write tense emails are signaling something. If you reply with data only, or send the email up to an administrator, you confirm the worry. Save admin escalation for situations where the parent is hostile or the issue is outside your scope, and this email was neither.
You'll work through five scenes from one class period in the first week of school. Each decision carries a point value, and at the end you'll see your path, your total, and a feedback message.
You'll work through five scenes, and every decision carries a point value.
It's Period 3 on day three of school, and the bell rings. Three students are still chatting at the door, and two more drift in late. The rest sit and look at you, waiting to see what happens.
You're explaining the day's objective. Two students near the back are having a side conversation, and the student between them is looking up at you, trying to listen. Most of the class is with you.
A student refuses to start the partner activity. 'I'm not doing this with him,' she says, gesturing at the assigned partner. The class is watching.
Eight minutes are left. The partner activity has gone better than expected, and most pairs are finishing early. Two pairs are off task, and four pairs are looking around for what to do next.
Two minutes are left, and you have time for a quick close. The class is still in pairs, and the room is loud with end-of-activity energy.
You'll find three quick scenarios below. For each one, pick the framework that explains the behavior best, then read the feedback under each option.
Each scenario has one best-fitting framework from Module 1. Choose the card you'd reach for if you had to diagnose the moment in your own classroom.
Scenario 1 of 3. Marcus's algebra class meets in Room 204. After two weeks of pop quizzes that always feel surprising and stressful, Marcus starts feeling tense as he walks toward the room, even on Mondays when there is no quiz. He can't explain why; the room itself sets him off.
Scenario 2 of 3. Tanya's homework return rate jumps after a teacher starts giving brief, specific verbal acknowledgments to students who turn work in on time. Within two weeks, the on-time return rate for the whole class climbs from 60 percent to 85 percent.
Scenario 3 of 3. A student who has been struggling with a math concept can almost solve problems on her own but stalls at one specific step. Her teacher shows her how to handle the step the first three times; on the fourth try, the student gets through it without help. By the next class, she's solving similar problems on her own.
The ten cards below describe Module 1 terms through classroom scenarios. Tap a card to flip it, then mark it Got it or Review again. At the end, you can run the cards you missed one more time.
Each card describes a classroom moment. Name the term that fits, then use the buttons to sort the card into Got it or Review again.
You can drag each classroom moment into the management theory that diagnoses it best. Some moments repeat from the Seifert Ch 7 sort, and this set adds Maslow's basic-needs lens to the other three theorists.
Some moves could fit more than one lens, so go with the closest match. When you're done, click Check to see how you did.
Here's a single classroom moment, annotated through three theoretical frames from this module. Hover over or tab to the numbered buttons in the example to see what each lens explains.
You'll see one classroom scenario through three theoretical lenses. Each annotation shows what the lens explains.
On day three of school, the math teacher introduced a new procedure: silent work on the warm-up posted on the board, no talking until she rang a small bell at minute five. Marcus came in loud on day three. On day four, he watched another student get a quiet thumbs-up from the teacher for entering in silence and starting the warm-up. By day five, Marcus was coming in quiet too. By day eight, the teacher stopped ringing the bell. Students transitioned out of the warm-up on their own, looking up at her for the next instruction without being prompted.
The procedure and the teacher's thumbs-up form a stimulus-reinforcer pair. The thumbs-up is positive reinforcement, and the operant (silent entry) becomes more frequent. If the teacher fades the thumbs-up a little at a time, the behavior will persist on an intermittent schedule.
Marcus watched a classmate get a thumbs-up for a quiet entry, and then he copied her. He imitated a model whose behavior was reinforced, and by day five his entry matched what the class expected.
By day eight, students have assimilated the procedure into their schema for "how this class works," so they don't need the bell. Skinner explains the rate change, and Piaget explains why the rate change persists without the cue.
Type the term that fits each blank. The check accepts synonyms, abbreviations, and alternate spellings where they fit. Click Check when you're done to see your results.
The three short paragraphs below cover classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and the Vygotsky-and-Kounin lenses for the classroom.
In classical conditioning, the stimulus that triggers a reflex response without any learning is called the , and the reflex itself is the . After repeated pairings, a stimulus that started out neutral becomes a , which now elicits a on its own. When the pairing stops, the response fades over time, and the fade is called . Pavlov's dogs salivated to a bell that had been paired with food, and the same logic explains why students who associate Mr. Horrible's classroom with frowns will at the room itself.
In operant conditioning, the behavior whose frequency is being shaped is called the , and the consequence that increases its frequency is the . The pattern by which reinforcement follows the behavior is the ; partial schedules produce behavior that takes longer to learn but is more to extinction than continuous schedules. The signal that tells a learner reinforcement is available right now is the , which is why a teacher's call-on can prompt one student to speak and tell the rest of the class it isn't an open turn yet.
Vygotsky's name for the gap between what a learner does alone and what they do with help is the ; the temporary support a teacher provides inside the gap is . Kounin's term for the teacher's communicated awareness of every part of the room at once is , and the observation that one off-task student left alone affects the students around them is the . The smallest possible move on Marzano's graduated response scale, often enough to redirect off-task behavior without breaking the lesson, is .
I chose the eleven videos in this library because each one teaches a concept from Module 1 in a way the textbook can't. Reading about Piaget's conservation task tells you what a preoperational child believes, and a short clip lets you watch a child make the mistake. Reading about the satisfactions of teaching gives you a list, and watching Rita Pierson make the case for what teachers do for kids gives you the feeling the list is trying to describe.
As you watch, write one sentence per video connecting something in the video to something specific from your reading. Aim for a connection instead of a summary. You can use the sentences in Discussions 1 and 2, and with them written down, you'll have a starting point when it's time to record.
This section has seven chapter walkthroughs, short videos by other educators that go with the readings. You can watch each one before or during your reading of the matching chapter, whichever helps you process the material. The walkthroughs point you to where you should focus, and you'll still need to do the reading.
You can watch two short pieces from outside the textbook tradition. Dalton Sherman was a ten-year-old student who addressed thousands of Dallas ISD employees at their 2008 convocation. His message was a question: do you believe in me? Rita Pierson, a teacher for forty years, made the same case from the other direction in a TED talk with more than seventeen million views. Both connect to Seifert Ch 1 (the satisfactions and demands of the profession) and to Marzano Ch 9 (the relationship work a teacher does to hold the class together).
The two demos below show Seifert Chapter 2 in practice. The first is a classic short clip of the conservation experiment from the chapter's opening: an adult pours water from a tall glass into a wide pie plate, and a preoperational child claims the amount changed. The second is a clear visual explanation of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, and it connects to the scaffolding moves you'll design in Module 2.
Which video from Part 3 (Why Teachers Do This Work) and which from Part 4 (Learning Theory in Action) connect best to your reading? For each one, write a sentence connecting the video to something specific from the reading, and bring the sentences into Discussions 1 and 2.
Self-Check. The short review below covers the terms in the Module 1 vocab deck, and the fill-in-the-blank prompts accept synonyms where they fit. You can use it as a final pass on the readings before you mark the module Complete with the status buttons on the Overview tab.
Type the term that fits each sentence, and press Tab to move from one blank to the next. When you're done, click Check, and the check will accept synonyms where they fit.
1. Vygotsky's gap between independent and assisted performance is the .
2. Kounin's term for awareness of everything happening in the room is .
3. The learning theory focused on observable behavior change through stimulus and reinforcement is .
4. The learning theory holding that students build understanding by integrating new information with prior knowledge is .
5. The learning theory focused on internal mental processes like attention and memory is .
6. Lee Canter's classroom management model based on clear rules and consistent consequences is .
7. Glasser's framework that behavior is a choice driven by basic psychological needs is called .
8. The temporary support a teacher provides until a student can perform on their own is .
9. Maslow's pyramid arguing that basic needs come before higher learning is the .
10. The repeatable steps for a recurring classroom activity are .
11. In Hunter's lesson model, the opening activity that focuses students' attention on the upcoming content is the .
12. The teacher's deliberate three-second pause after asking a question is .
You'll find three classroom moments below. For each one, choose the management theory behind the teacher's move, then read the feedback after each pick.
Scenario 1 of 3. A student arrives without breakfast and seems unable to focus on the warm-up. The teacher hands the student a granola bar, without comment, before continuing the lesson.
Scenario 2 of 3. A student refuses partner work. The teacher pulls the student aside and asks, "Which need is going unmet right now: belonging, power, fun, or freedom?"
Scenario 3 of 3. A student turns in a third late assignment in two weeks. The teacher applies the agreed-upon late penalty as written in the syllabus, without lecturing or negotiating.
Below is a short set of "answer first, then check" prompts on classroom management and communication, and each one asks a question you'll face in the first month of teaching.
In one sentence, what's the shortest test of whether a classroom rule will hold up under pressure?
You inherit someone's classroom management plan. The plan is supposed to hold up under day-three testing. Which element tends to break first?
A reactive room looks different from a preventive one. What signals the difference inside the first ten minutes?
Here's a question to ask yourself mid-lesson: am I demonstrating withitness, or am I policing?
Use the deck for a last check before you submit. The front of each card asks a readiness question, and when you flip it, the back describes what "ready" looks like.
Everything below is optional. The links go to outside sites that support the Module 1 readings on classroom management, learning theory, motivation, and the relational core of teaching.
Wong and Wong's book is a popular guide for new teachers. It's practical and specific on procedures and routines, and you can read it alongside Marzano Ch 8.
Harry K. Wong Publications · ISBN 978-0976423331CHAMPS is Randy Sprick's framework for structuring classroom expectations: Conversation, Help, Activity, Movement, Participation, Success. It's a useful template for designing paired rules and procedures.
Dan Pink talks about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The talk connects to this course's four pulls into teaching and to Seifert Ch 6 on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.
Rita Pierson talks about the relational core of teaching, and you can watch her talk alongside Marzano Ch 9 (Building Relationships). Watch it before you draft your interdisciplinary activity.
The guide covers the revised Bloom's taxonomy on a single page, with verbs and example tasks for each level. It gives you useful background for the cognitive frame in Seifert Ch 2.
OpenStax Psychology 2e is a free, peer-reviewed open educational resource. Chapter 6 covers operant and classical conditioning, and Chapter 7 covers cognitive psychology. You can use it as a strong second source on the lenses Seifert and Sutton introduce in Ch 2.