Handbook of Classroom Management: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues

Classroom management is a topic of enduring concern for teachers, administrators, and the public. It consistently ranks as the first or second most serious educational problem in the eyes of the general public, and beginning teachers consistently rank it as their most pressing concern during their early teaching years. Management problems continue to be a major cause of teacher burnout and job dissatisfaction. Strangely, despite this enduring concern on the part of educators and the public, few researchers have chosen to focus on classroom management or to identify themselves with this critical field.
 
The Handbook of Classroom Management has four primary goals: 1) to clarify the term classroom management; 2) to demonstrate to scholars and practitioners that there is a distinct body of knowledge that directly addresses teachers’ managerial tasks; 3) to bring together disparate lines of research and encourage conversations across different areas of inquiry; and 4) to promote a vigorous agenda for future research in this area. To this end, 47 chapters have been organized into 10 sections, each chapter written by a recognized expert in that area. Cutting across the sections and chapters are the following themes:
*First, positive teacher-student relationships are seen as the very core of effective classroom management.
*Second, classroom management is viewed as a social and moral curriculum.
*Third, external reward and punishment strategies are not seen as optimal for promoting academic and social-emotional growth and self-regulated behavior.
*Fourth, to create orderly, productive environments teachers must take into account student characteristics such as age, developmental level, race, ethnicity, cultural background, socioeconomic status, and ableness.
        
Like other research handbooks, the Handbook of Classroom Management provides an indispensable reference volume for scholars, teacher educators, in-service practitioners, and the academic libraries serving these audiences. It is also appropriate for graduate courses wholly or partly devoted to the study of classroom management. 

Carolyn M. Evertson, Ph.D., is Professor of Education Emerita, and Associate Dean for Graduate Education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. For the past 30 years, her research has focused on classroom management and research on teaching and learning in classrooms. While at Peabody College, Vanderbilt, she has directed numerous federally funded projects on classroom management, instructional processes, and teacher education. Her early classroom research studies focused on how teachers orchestrated activities and achieved order in classrooms from the first days of school. From this work came other studies that extended this initial work to focusing on how teachers learn to manage classrooms in different school contexts. Evertson received her doctorate in Educational Psychology from The University of Texas, Austin, and directed the Classroom Organization and Effective Teaching Program at the University of Texas Research and Development for Teacher Education. After coming to Vanderbilt, she used this research to develop COMP: Creating Conditions for Learning, a program that assists teachers in understanding and enacting productive classroom management and instruction processes in their classrooms. For the past 15 years, the program has provided assistance to over 70,000 teachers and administrators across the nation. Her writings include over 100 chapters, articles, and books on classroom management, teacher education, learning in classrooms and research on teaching, including two textbooks (co-authored with Edmund Emmer and Murray Worsham) for new teachers in their 7th editions, Classroom Management for Elementary Teachers and Classroom Management for Middle and High School Teachers, Allyn & Bacon Publishers. Carol S. Weinstein is professor emerita in the Department of Learning and Teaching at Rutgers Graduate School of Education. She received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was at Harvard that Dr. Weinstein first became interested in the impact of classroom design on students' behavior and attitudes. She pursued this topic for many years, writing about the ways that classroom environments can be designed to facilitate teachers' goals and to foster children's learning and development. Her interest in organizing classroom space eventually expanded to include classroom organization and management in general. She is the author of Secondary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Elementary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (with Andrew J. Mignano, Jr., McGraw-Hill, 2003), and numerous chapters and articles on classroom management and teacher education students' beliefs about caring and control. Most recently, she has focused on the need for "culturally responsive classroom management," or classroom management in the service of social justice. In 2000, Dr. Weinstein was recognized for her efforts with the "Contributing Researcher Award" from the American Federation of Teachers for "Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice in Effective Classroom Management."