Given the fact that the concept of “classroom management” and its connotations as well as its relation to effective teaching, despite decades of world-wide research, remain rather undefined, or, at least, not fully described, different educational systems and teachers around the world try hard to develop a wide variety of classroom management theories and strategies, since they obviously consider it as being significantly related to effective teaching. Effective classroom management reflects teachers’ multifaceted high-ranked ability to, inter alia, establish and maintain within their classrooms acceptable rules of productive teacher-to-student and student-to-student communication, to motivate students to work cooperatively, and to fruitfully implement best teaching strategies according to their students’ individualized learning needs. Moreover, it presupposes teachers’ ability to create a learning context where students’ disruptive attitudes are prevented or addressed and misbehavior is reduced while positive expected learning outcomes are achieved, and the students’ cognitive, social and affective development is continuously facilitated and sustained. Finally, it is based on teachers’ ability to set clearly defined and agreed—between teacher and students—codes of communication, to produce measurable learning outcomes that fulfill students’ and their parents’ expectations, and to take full advantage of their students’ features, classroom features, and local space features in order to develop their own professional features. It is, thus, evident why successful classroom management is considered by teachers, parents, students, and researchers to be tightly linked to teachers’ professional competence and effectiveness.
Moreover, teachers who successfully implement classroom management are reported to create in time a regulatory framework for communication within the classroom through the establishment and adoption of rules and consequences. They also tend to safeguard the quality of communication with their students, and to develop their professional authority profile. They succeed in that by strengthening their willingness to meet students’ learning requirements, needs, and interests, by using effectively verbal and non-verbal communication to encourage learning and, above all, by controlling and managing their institutionalized power.
International research over the past years has shown that the implementation of learner-centered innovative teaching strategies on the basis of flexible differentiated teaching focused on students’ personal values, abilities and potential, the establishment of student-to-student shared responsibility and of a student-to-teacher commitment contract, the development of a dynamic interplay between students during group work, the respect for diversity, and the reinforcing of students’ self-regulation all highly contribute to the creation of a fruitful in-class learning environment. In such an environment students feel secure and accepted, teachers manage the classroom successfully and are considered to be competent and effective professionals.
REFLECTIONS OF CREATIVITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM
