🔗 linkedin.com/in/feed

Research Focus: Classroom Management • Preservice Teacher Preparation

“Bridging the Gap, Enhancing Teacher Preparation for Classroom Management”

What research challenge did your dissertation address?

My research addresses a persistent gap between how teacher preparation programs equip preservice teachers for classroom management and what those graduates actually face in today’s classrooms. Nearly half of first-year teachers report feeling underprepared to manage student behavior, and roughly half of new teachers leave the profession within five years. That challenge has intensified since the pandemic, as elementary classrooms present increasingly complex behavioral needs and teachers must support students with ADHD, autism, and trauma all at once. My study confronts three interconnected gaps: a theory-practice disconnect that provides frameworks but not readiness for extreme behaviors, a lack of differentiated strategies for classrooms with multiple types of diverse learners at once, and the developmental struggle new teachers face translating either into daily practice.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

My inspiration is deeply personal. Thirty years ago, I graduated from a teacher preparation program and walked into an urban classroom full of students with social and emotional needs I hadn’t been prepared to meet; I had the theory, but not the readiness. That experience never left me. Decades later, as an adjunct professor teaching the Classroom Management course in a preservice program, I watched the same pattern repeat in my students, some of whom questioned whether they could stay in the profession at all. Seeing new teachers face the exact gap I had faced a generation earlier made the problem impossible to ignore, and action research gave me a way to treat my students and recent graduates as collaborators in redesigning the course around what they actually needed.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

Evaluating the redesigned course module through surveys of 57 junior-year preservice teachers and three focus groups showed strong positive perceptions of every innovation, along with clear shifts in preservice teachers’ diagnostic thinking, confidence, and emotional readiness to manage diverse classrooms. The impact has extended well beyond the study itself: the redesigned course, built around a Three Cs Framework (Connect, Collaborate, Control) and a semester-long classroom simulation, is now the model I teach across every section of the program, and colleagues have begun integrating the toolkit into their own teaching. I’ve since founded a company to curate authentic new-teacher narratives as a resource for teacher educators, and I’m pursuing publication of the curriculum so other preparation programs can adopt these tools.

“I have all of these strategies that I’ve learned in college, and my brain will just shut off.”

— Ms. D