THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF CLASSROOM CULTURE
Building a classroom culture that sustains and drives excellence requires mastering skills in five aspects of your relationships with students. These five aspects, or
principles, are often confused and conflated. Many educators fail to consider the
difference between them; others use the names indiscriminately or interchangeably. However, since you must be sure to make the most of all five in your
classroom, it’s worth taking a moment to distinguish them.
THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF CLASSROOM CULTURE
Discipline
Management
Control
Influence
Engagement
The Synergy of the Five Principles
The techniques described in the following chapters rely on all five of these aspects
of classroom culture to varying degrees. Some require more of one than another,
but because the synergy of the five makes each one stronger, the techniques an
effective teacher uses ideally leverage all five. A teacher who uses only one or two
will ultimately fail to build a vibrant classroom culture. A teacher who uses only
control but not discipline, for example, will produce students who never learn to
do things on their own and always need firm directives to act. A classroom in
which the teacher does not have control and tries to address students who “don’t”
exclusively through management of consequences will overuse the consequences,
accustom students to the consequences, and erode their effectiveness in his own
and other classes.
