In my own classroom management practice as a substitute teacher, and especially in the disastrous twenty-two days I was trying unsuccessfully to teach in a classroom at Southern Elementary School, I went in search of a "critical" pattern of classroom management, keeping in mind my need to conform to normal classroom practices as deemed appropriate by the school and District hierarchies, and the students' needs for respect and care, needs which would have had the ultimate primacy were I actually to find such a thing as "critical classroom management." In short, if I had to apply classroom management as an alibi for an understocked classroom full of undermotivated and rebellious children, I would want to apply a form of classroom management that was respectful and caring.

I am calling this genre of classroom management discourse "semi-critical," because this discourse leaves as uncriticized the basic idealism that inspires teachers to conduct instructional ritual; that education can be a joy as it is experienced, and can lead to emotional and/or intellectual and/or financial success in later life. Authors such as John Holt (Instead of Education) or John Gatto (Dumbing us Down) argue against school per se, that schooling is bad for children, from the perspective of advocates of the homeschooling movement. Semi-critical classroom management instead criticizes the social, political, and ritual basis of repressive instructional ritual in order to re-make (or rehabilitate) such ritual into a ritual capable fulfilling idealistic notions of community, to the extent possible within real-life teaching situations in public schools.

I will not discuss comprehensively the varieties of semi-critical classroom management that exist in today's market for advice to teachers. Instead, I will limit my discussion to three texts on classroom management that I found in the teaching environments I experienced as a substitute, and two formative psychological guides to semi-critical classroom management that informed my initial interest in a career in teaching. Of the classroom management texts, the first one, Alfie Kohn's Beyond Discipline, was one I discovered in the office of the assistant principal of Local Elementary School, when I was working there; the second text is Jeanne Gibbs' Tribes, a text I have already mentioned; the third text is Moorman and Dishon's Our Classroom, which I discovered in a cabinet of a classroom in Local Elementary where I was working.

I formed an audience for a particular type of classroom text, or a consumer for a text to be consumed, the "critical classroom management" text. Largely, I pursued this path because the changes I would have to make in my own habits of behavior to become a disciplinarian required too much effort and did not seem to me to be worthwhile in terms of my overall deportment-toward-others.

There was also a problem inventing a standard for these children to meet, a standard I felt confident holding up, given my relative unwillingness to adopt the discourse of standards Southern Elementary School marketed to its teachers. The classroom materials I was given for this class, at the beginning of the year, were too complex for the children; when I assigned them textbook materials to read and textbook comprehension questions to answer, the answers I received to the textbook questions made no sense, and revealed a general student incomprehension of the material. (Well, maybe one or two of the 5th grade students, in a classroom which had nine 5th graders and nineteen 4th graders, understood the textbook work.) The series of subskills which were to be mastered, which the school had its own name for, did not appear to be given any particular motivating force, as if I was supposed to know beforehand what motivated these students to comply with what I thought they would be bored by -- so there was a misunderstanding on my part as to what motivated the students.

What motivated the students in the midst of the chaos of Southern Elementary, I concluded in the end, was doing simple math problems and handwriting busywork (while talking to their friends and behaving chaotically), and reducing my teaching practices to adapt to this situation, I concluded, did not interest me as much as the possibility of getting a "better" job. Perhaps it might be easy to accuse me of an elitist disdain for these often rebellious students in the situation I found myself; nevertheless, my attitude was one it was easy for me to retreat into, given my lack of support as a long-term substitute teacher and the difficulty of getting them do do the various activities I had planned for them. Reading to them was an impossibility; P.E. was chaotic and resulted in my students scattering to the various corners of the classroom, most of them talking and/or fighting in small groups; they did not like to do creative writing, reading, or drawing, with anything resembling a sustained effort.

The closest thing I have encountered to a genuinely "critical" critique of the typical lore of classroom management is a book by Alfie Kohn called Beyond Discipline. As the cover illustrates, Kohn offers "a provocative challenge to the field of classroom management," and proposes a political difference in the way classrooms behave, "from compliance to community" as the book's subtitle says.

Alfie Kohn's book, according to his introduction, started with his quest to understand the secret of dealing with discipline problems, while observing classrooms. "My assumption was that I would learn more from seeing how talented practitioners responded to obnoxious behavior than I could from reading books on the subject." What he discovered, he says, is that discipline wasn't what these teachers were doing, that it in fact interfered with their goals. Kohn then goes into a long discussion of how the psychological "experts" in classroom discipline (especially Dreikurs, Canter, and Albert) are basically vindictive in their attitudes toward children, all the while attacking these "experts'" recommendations that teachers unthinkingly coerce children using threats and bribes.

Kohn wants to question why it is necessary "for teachers to be in control of their classrooms." (p 59), but then moves to an argument for negotiation between students and teacher as the main structure holding the classroom together, with a view toward advertising "the practical advantage of letting children make decisions" within this structure. Kohn's ultimate aim within this argument is "building community," that within this aim he wants to emphasize that "serious commitment offers an invitation to move beyond discipline." (107)

Kohn is well known as an advocate of freedom of choice for children (see "Choices for Children," Phi Delta Kappan, September 1993, pp. 8-22), an opponent of competition (No Contest: The Case against Competition), and a critic of external reinforcement as a teacher strategy (Punished by Rewards): his primary argument about classwork is that if one wants one's students to do well in school, one should give students work that is fulfilling in itself, rather than depending on external reinforcements to goad students to work. (Kohn's endorsement of "choice" seems to fit in well with the "liminoid" role I played at times as a substitute, since what characterizes the "liminoid" is precisely this element of choice.) His suggestions all appear perfectly reasonable, and might, according to the definition of classroom management narrative posed above, be a model of classroom management in themselves. However, in reading his book, I felt tempted to ask questions about Kohn's ideas which would test the extent to which they were possible in real-life public school classrooms.

Kohn addresses critical questions of classroom management most directly. One matter at hand for Kohn is "why students should have a say" in the classroom ritual, about which he says:

...we can move on to consider the practical advantages of letting students make decisions. The first benefit is that giving them some say will make it more likely that they will do essentially what we want. Choice promotes compliance and minimizes misbehavior (81)

Also, Kohn, like many writers of texts on classroom management, advocates the use of classroom meetings to resolve problems. But not among Kohn's visualizations of classroom problems is the possibility that the teacher may be too overburdened with existing relationships or conflicts between students, or "emotional baggage" students bring into classrooms, to be able to start a classroom meeting in the first place. And convening the meeting, it must be remembered, is a first step. Creating a classroom on Kohn's model requires teachers "to provide other things I've talked about in this book: the opportunity to make decisions, the caring and safe community, the valuable curriculum, and the social skills." and Kohn warns that "Without these things, chaos may turn out to be the alternative to control after all." But are teachers really powerful enough to create "caring and safe community," the power to make decisions that won't be self-destructive, a curriculum the students will value, and social skills for students? Part of me thinks Kohn might want more management, and not less, that perhaps a social manager more powerful than a teacher might bring this "community": a principal, perhaps, or a superintendent, or a Congressmember powerful enough to channel urban aid to America's impoverished inner cities. Alfie Kohn offers an attractive argument telling us what we should want from schools, while being short on discussion of the obstacles we might face in getting there. Schooling remains problematic as an agency-in-itself for changing society. Kohn's best tactic, given his preference for negotiation as a strategy for social order, is in trying to negotiate with the reader as regards how much of his program the reader is willing to implement.

In light of the above discussion, the problems of classroom management may appear to many teachers to be onerous, difficult, and obliging the teacher to use extensive "emergency powers" in order to have a coherent classroom at all, while at the same time these teachers might desire students empowered to solve their problems, an empowerment which isn't granted them under these same emergency powers. Thus I call the genre that I use to group Kohn's book "semi-critical classroom management." Many of these writers recognize, as did Kohn, that student initiative is the first step in any real learning process, and that such initiative can't be coerced out of students. These texts are "semi-critical" because they compromise the goals of Kohn's ideal of community in order to create an expedient classroom order, because the public school coerces children into an enclosure (Foucault 141) and then asks them to conform to classroom order demands, curricular demands, standardized testing, and other legal demands which they may with justification consider unfair or otherwise not worth doing.

Jeanne Gibbs' book Tribes, a book I cited earlier as a canonical guide to classroom management at Local Elementary School, is certainly a book of semi-critical classroom management. Tribes (when it isn't underlined, Tribes refers to the system in Tribes the book) is basically a system for implementing cooperative learning in the classroom, under a system where "the classroom is student-centered (people no longer relate primarily to the teacher, but work with peers)" and where teachers are to consider, "how can we help students formulate their own learning goals" (25). The techniques of Tribes are centrally aimed at forming "community," the goal of Kohn's book. There are two main rituals indicated: 1) community circle, where all students and teachers sit in a circle, and where everyone takes turns speaking, one person at a time, all the way around the circle. There are four norms for the successful performance of community circle :

*1. Attentive Listening: not merely being quiet, but "letting others know that they have been heard and checking for understanding" *2. Appreciation/No Put-Downs: "avoiding negative remarks, name-calling, hurtful gestures and behaviors" *3. Right to pass: if you don't want to say anything, you merely say "pass" and it's the next person's turn *4. Mutual respect: "resolving conflicts that naturally emerge due to the differences among us."

The other form of Tribes organization, clearly, is the "tribe": the teacher is to split the class up into groups. Elementary school and middle school are to be grouped in groups of four and five. At Local, each group had a name and much classwork was to be done cooperatively, with "tribes" given responsibility for completing assignments. So what we have is a system that is open to democratic and communal organization, that is supposedly brought into being by teachers. A list of possible rituals for community circle, tribes, and other groupings is given at the back of the book. There are other tools, advertised in the Tribes Web page (http://www.tribes.com/) for accomplishing this system.

As part of "my story" I tell the story of how, when I was given a long-term substitute teaching position at Southern Elementary, I found out, after about 20 days at the teaching position, how to properly enforce the system of "community circle" when I was doing it poorly all along. I needed to know what to do in case the system didn't catch on, because I was working with a classroom (at that time) that wasn't succeeding with what I was doing. The point I'm making in this chapter is that Tribes, though it may be "democratic education" in certain ways, might require an authoritarian teacher presence at the beginning of its implementation (under certain conditions) if community circle, the separation of the class into "tribes," etc. is to be made possible at all with certain students, most specifically the ones at Southern Elementary I describe above. Otherwise students who are repeatedly asked to sit in a circle will spend their time talking with their immediate friends, and attempts to get them to talk in front of the entire class will not succeed. Thus any possibility that students may have wished to resolve conflicts with other students through the community circle process, or to use the process to improve the quality of classroom activity, was abrogated through student rejection of the process itself.

I cite Tribes because it was used with especial thoroughness at Local Elementary, including (and I was allowed to observe this) the ritual of the "put-down funeral," which ritualized the strategy of "putting down the put downs" given on p.368 of Tribes. Local Elementary made this into an elaborate ceremony involving (at times) nearly the entire school. A similar classroom management scheme to Tribes was used at another school in the Valley Unified School District, only this school employed a popular "semi-critical" system or ethos that was marketed to them as "Peacemakers," and which used a classroom meeting similar to the Community Circle used in Tribes.

In the end, however, I felt that Tribes was also used as a mechanism of classroom control, as was confessed to me by another teacher at Local. Another teacher said to me that "democratic education" was something they didn't do at Local Elementary. I concluded that sometimes "community building" can mean the building of a community where one person leads and everyone else follows. However, the use of Tribes at Local didn't appear to magically increase the "control" substitutes had over their classes, as my observations of substitute teachers (and I only had the opportunity to observe subs two or three times) at Local would seem to show -- substitutes were sometimes ignored by the upper-grade classes I observed. My own experience substitute teaching at Local would seem to confirm that I had as little authority at Local as I did anywhere else in the District, although it appeared at times that classrooms at Local Elementary went rather smoothly because the teachers had worked hard to prepare the class for the appearence of a substitute, and because there didn't appear to be much conflict between students at Local.

It's likely, however, that the use of Tribes at Local helped create an atmosphere of harmony between students, as was emphasized in the ritual of the Put-Down Funeral and in the relatively conflict-free relations I had with students there. The Tribes promotional movie one could obtain from Center Source Systems, the publishers of Tribes, emphasized that students got to know each other more thoroughly when Tribes was used as a guide to classroom ritual in classrooms than when it wasn't.

A book of semi-critical classroom management which explains the possibility of student-centered education as if it made a difference is Chick Moorman and Dee Dishon's Our Classroom. I cite this book as an exemplar of how semi-critical classroom management can be applied in practice, because I saw it on the desk of a first-grade classroom where I was substitute teaching, for a week, at Local Elementary School. (I met the regular teacher some time after the assignment, and she congratulated me for doing well with her class.) In the chapter of this book titled "Classroom Management," Moorman and Dishon propose that we imagine a continuum between "student control" and "teacher control" in a classroom. In a student-controlled classroom, say the authors, teachers are not needed and students have no direction. In a teacher-controlled classroom, they say, students tend to "act out in the lunchroom, during recess, and when a substitute teacher is in charge." (Moorman and Dishon 48). The alternative, say these authors, is shared control. Shared control is phrased in terms of an invitation: "Our Classroom" practitioners invite their students to enjoy one another, act cooperatively, and perform self-responsible behaviors. They invite children to participate in an evolving environment of mutual respect and caring.(Moorman and Dishon 51).

One of my main points in elaborating on Our Classroom is that the goals it illustrates are radically different from the stated goals of a typical state-mandated curriculum, which will will measure progress solely upon student mastery of linguistic and mathematical skills, as can be formulated in terms of correct problem-solving by individual students taking standardized tests. Our Classroom would erect a social standard for the whole class's success, and specify a curriculum for the attainment of that standard, in a way that Moorman and Dishon suggest would be good for substitute teachers.

Technique for Our Classroom involves a series of rituals for inviting student input, inviting student responsibility, managing the mind of the teacher, and managing the classroom for cooperation. Inviting student input involved the creation of suggestion boxes (by teachers) and the creation of journals (by students) and goal statements (by students). The authors argue that students should be invited to create class norms and learn a problem-solving process to solve "problems" as they are voiced by participants in classroom ritual. "Inviting student responsibility" involves delegating the duties of classroom ritual to the students, and creating "Choice Time" (or perhaps Choice Times, in the plural) where students are allowed to choose between several alternatives. The teacher-imposed limitation of these alternatives, or "controlled choices," is what the authors are proposing. "Managing my own mind" is basically advice about the dialogue teachers conduct with themselves, and "managing the classroom for cooperation" is a discussion of how to teach social skills in cooperative learning rituals.

In Our Classroom, Chick Moorman and Dee Dishon construct a typical reader whose primary interest is "classroom control," and in constructing that reader, invites that reader to understand the idea of management as invitation. (50). The authors offer a philosophy of control that make it clear that "control" is invitation, too.

As a teacher, you have no control over whether or not your invitations are accepted. You only control whether your invitations are sent. And because sending invitations is within your control and accepting invitations is not, it makes sense to concentrate on what you have control over. (p. 51)

One teacher created a common materials area by spreading butcher paper over a table and taping it underneath. Then she laid all the materials out on the table, traced around them, and put the objects back. When a student took the scissors, the outline and the word scissors were left as a reminder of where they were to be returned.(p 90)

Our Classroom wishes to begin a brainstorming dialogue about how students can be invited to maintain classroom ritual. "Reminders" are used, of course, with the assumption that they actually do remind, that what we're doing here is inviting children to remember. In the above case, children are being invited to remember to put equipment back, and not to lose it or make it useless or throw it away or make the ritual of equipment use otherwise impossible. "Permits" are suggested, too, as one possible invitation: "One third-grade teacher trains students in the proper use of audiovisual equipment. Only students with an operator's license can operate the equipment." (91-92)

What if they don't remember to take care of equipment? Well, the back-up solution appears to be the idea that we can offer them a permit to take care of it. And if that isn't accepted? "Invitations are not always accepted" (p. 51), we're told, but of course we aren't told what to do when invitations are refused, or accepted. Our Classroom moves forward in idealistic spirit, offering more and more diverse suggestions for creating the enjoyable-sounding classroom its authors want to propose. Perhaps classroom rituals in classrooms can diversify and allow for more complex forms of "permission" and "invitation" in the ways Moorman and Dishon recommend. That can happen if conditions permit it, if the Our Classroom classrooms are ready to accept Moorman and Dishon's form of social order.

Something should lastly be said about two important psychologists' versions of semi-critical classroom management that are praised by Alfie Kohn in Beyond Discipline. They are Thomas Gordon, author of T.E.T., Teacher Effectiveness Training, and William Glasser, author of several books, the most pertinent to this study of which would be Control Theory in the Classroom. T.E.T. relies formally upon training teachers in a ritual form of communication that would emphasize the building of conflict resolution skills in students and teachers. The skills involve 1. Silence and attentive listening, 2. Acknowledgment responses, 3. Door openers, invitations to talk, 4. Active listening. Teachers and students are to learn to assert themselves through "I-messages," just as is proscribed as the norm in Tribes. T.E.T. tries to redescribe problems in "classroom management" as problems in conflict of interest between students and teachers, and offers control of the classroom space as a means for teachers to set up a classroom that is free of conflict, where they don't need to use "force" to solve problems. Gordon views the use of "force" as counterproductive because, he argues, coercion is demeaning to the coerced. (designing ritual)

Control Theory in the Classroom starts from a theory of innate human psychological need. Glasser describes as follows:

Humans not only need..(1) to survive and reproduce, but also (2) to belong and love, (3) to gain power, (4) to be free and (5) to have fun. (Glasser p. 23)

Semi-critical classroom management thus appears as a strategy for diversifying the discourse about "classroom management" to make it more "delegated" and appear less "coerced" and more "invited" than it is in its form of "traditional schooling." This form that appears to the above authors as completely defective in some school situations, resulting in forms of student communication which teachers call "misbehavior." The goals of semi-critical classroom management are those of "building community" within classrooms in a way that is ostensibly more "democratic," or perhaps just more well-delegated.

Another thing that might be a "goal" of semi-critical classroom management, or at least a reason for implementing it, is the way it dovetails with the "new capitalism" as described by Gee et al., in The New Work Order, a book I introduced in the introduction to this dissertation. The thesis of The New Work Order is that capitalism is becoming "fast capitalism," as the saturation of markets with goods is increasingly requiring producers to customize their products for consumers at a local level (Gee et al., pp. 17-18). This, in turn (say the authors), requires a different sort of educated person to work for it:

It is conceivable that semi-critical classroom management, with its emphasis upon cooperative learning, shared responsibility, and interchangeable work teams, might become attractive to certain schools not because of any desire to use it to create "community," but rather to produce workers that can adapt to changing conditions of the late capitalist work environment. Tribes lays this possibility out most clearly when it quotes Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor and proponent of "new capitalism," as regards the virtues of group learning: "This is an ideal preparation for life-times of symbolic analytic work" (Tribes 19).

My experience as a substitute teacher tended to support the notion that semi-critical classroom management could be used successfully in some circumstances (when the ground had been prepared for such success by the regular teacher or teachers), to ameliorate the needs for scripts, for repressive instructional rituals, and for systems of discipline requiring external reinforcement that are required of many teachers today.

Chapter 6 -- Chapter 8