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Classroom Organization and Management Program

Beginning the school year is often a daunting task for even experienced teachers. It is apt to be even more daunting for those with limited experience or those experiencing transitions (changes in grade level, subject matter, etc.). To provide help beginning the school year, the Classroom Organization and Management Program (COMP) at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, has been training teachers in ways to develop and enhance their classroom management systems so as to begin the school year in the best possible way. This entry explains the origins of COMP in the work of classroom management researchers, outlines the key premises underlying the program, describes a COMP inservice training session, and concludes with a brief review of studies evaluating the program’s effectiveness.

Research and Background

COMP incorporates both foundational and recent research on classroom management, particularly the seminal research of Jacob Kounin, Jere Brophy, and Carolyn Evertson.

Jacob Kounin

COMP is rooted in the research of Jacob Kounin, one of several pioneers in classroom management. Kounin’s research on the characteristics of good classroom managers yielded an understanding of the importance of preventing student misbehavior in the first place. He showed that how proactive teachers are in designing, initiating, and maintaining effective learning environments determines classroom behavior. For example, teachers who give directions without ensuring that students are listening or who assume students will remember stated expectations without being reminded are more likely to experience misbehavior. In contrast, teachers who proactively require their students’ attention in advance of sharing important information and who use signals to help students remember classroom expectations are more likely to experience appropriate behavior.

Kounin described a teacher with advanced awareness of students’ actions, dynamics, and potential directions as being withit—and defined withitness as a central variable in proactive teaching that promotes good, productive learning environments.

Jere Brophy

COMP also draws heavily from another pioneer in classroom management, Jere Brophy. Brophy observed how teachers communicate their expectations to students and found that teachers often communicate preferences and prejudices that can hamper student achievement. For example, teachers may subconsciously communicate differing standards of achievement for high- versus low-performing students, when they stand near low-performing students but encourage them less often, ask fewer questions, make less eye contact, and smile less frequently.

Alternatively, teachers who hold high standards for all students use best practices to help each student work toward his or her potential. These include providing all students with multiple opportunities to respond to questions about content; ample, immediate feedback on their responses to guide them toward content mastery; frequent, brief, supervised practice with content; and acknowledgment of their individual value through proximity, smiles, and encouragement. In keeping with Brophy’s research, COMP helps teachers adopt a more equitable and powerful way of communicating expectations of students.

Carolyn Evertson

Carolyn Evertson’s research provided a clear understanding of the components needed to establish effective learning environments at the beginning of the school year. Her research showed that teachers who only allude to but not teach their expectations at the beginning of the year tend to have students who do not achieve as well on standardized tests at the end of the year. This results in part from the necessity of using instructional time to repeatedly address issues about meeting teachers’ expectations and from reduced safety in risk-taking. Her research also showed that teachers who do teach their expectations at the beginning of the school year, typically through establishing rules and procedures, and who consistently reinforce these expectations have students who achieve higher on end-of-the-year standardized tests. In part, this success comes from having fewer distractions and increasing certainty of how to thrive in the learning setting. In light of this research, COMP trains teachers not only how to develop effective rules and procedures but also how to teach them to students.

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