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Authors: Carla Rahal, Lígia Portugal, Rodrigo Rahal
Keywords: engage, management, regulation, learning
Abstract: The core of this chapter is framed around two major strands in the early childhood/elementary classroom management literature. The first concerns the classroom itself, i.e., the procedures (techniques, methods, skills, and cognitions) for achieving, sustaining, and restoring orderliness in classroom environments. Attention, in other words, is directed to ways of orchestrating settings and action systems to capture children's attention, engagement, and focus so that curriculum activities can go on. The discussion in this section of the chapter is grounded in the ecological traditions in classroom management that have been built from innovative work of Jacob Kounin and Paul Gump (see Doyle, 1986). The second strand of the chapter has to do with the "social curriculum" of classroom management (see Powell, McLaughlin, Savage, & Zehm, 2001), that is, with the consequences of how classrooms are managed. The focus here is on young children's moral and prosocial development and the teaching of self management, responsibility, and resilience in contexts related to their conduct in school settings. This is an emerging emphasis in early childhood/elementary classroom management and one that has drawn a wide range of specializations and theoretical languages. In this section, the discourse shifts from the action systems and environmental structures of the ecologists to the idiosyncratic features of individual pupils as they progress through stages of their development and to the educative potential of different forms of adult-child and child-child interactions within classroom spaces