An ethnographic study of an elementary school teacher's establishment and maintenance of group norms

Statement of the Purpose The purpose of the study was to describe, document, and analyze the classroom management techniques used by an elementary school teacher to establish and maintain group norms. Design of the Study This dissertation grew out of Study C of the Effective Teacher Education Program at the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development in San Francisco, California. Study C, entitled "A Case Study of the Socialization of Students into the Classroom Instructional Process," was conducted during the first seven weeks of the 1976-1977 school year. Six ethnographers were used to observe three classroom teachers. This researcher participated as one of the ethnographers. The ethnographers were divided into teams of two and assigned to one teacher for the duration of the study. The ethnographers alternated observation periods to cover the entire teaching day. They were trained to collect data pertaining to teacher standards for acceptable student behavior, teacher expectations for individual performance, and the teacher's framework for instruction. Descriptive narratives of raw data called "protocols" portray a focused picture of an entire day's events for the teacher and the class. These protocols were generated by copious notetaking during the ethnographers' observation periods. These notes were dictated onto cassette audiotapes and later transcribed into typed scripts for analysis. Sample The sample for the study consisted of one of the nine teachers who formed the sample for the Far West Laboratory's Study B conducted in the spring of 1976. She was selected by a peer nomination process as one of the more outstanding teachers of mathematics at the fourth-grade level in her school district. In addition to being nominated by her peers, the teacher later was judged to be as effective or more effective than the average fourth-grade teacher in the district based on district-wide comparisons of standardized mathematics achievement scores for 78 fourth-grade classes and predicted gain scores for the Study B teacher sample. The teacher volunteered to participate in Study C. The students assigned to her were fourth and fifth graders of above average ability who were grouped homogeneously according to ability levels. The teacher has had 20 years teaching experience and holds a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education. She is Mexican-American as are the majority of the students in her class. The school in which the study was conducted in an elementary school located in a large metropolitan area on the West Coast. Results of the Study The data generated 15 findings related to the rules established and maintained during the seven weeks of the study. The findings relate to the number, categories, type, and source of the rules established; and the students' role in the establishment and maintenance processes. Two of the findings which seem to have greater implications for further research have an interesting link. One of the findings indicates that no student ever questioned the establishment of a rule. This would lead one to conclude that the students in the study willingly accepted the rules established. Yet another finding indicates that students in the study played an important role in determining which rules were modified, differentially applied, or inconsistently maintained by virtue of the fact the teacher adapted to the degree to which students acquiesced or resisted. These findings imply that students may appear to acquiesce to the establishment of rules, but when the teacher attempts to maintain the rules, patterns of overt resistance may occur. A Classroom Rule Establishment and Enforcement Model was developed to describe teacher actions in establishing and maintaining rules which this researcher believes may be generic to all teachers.Education, College o