When I was a student teacher, my girlfriend (now my wife) came for a classroom visit. I had prepared a 45-minute lecture on the U.S. involvement in the Cold War and was excited to present what I knew about the subject. My students were less excited, and several demonstrated their boredom by placing their heads on their desks during my lecture. “Their loss,” I thought to myself, as I continued to lecture to the rest of the class.
At the end of the lecture, as the bell rang ending the period, my girlfriend began to make her way up to the front of the class. After all the students had left the room, she asked me this:
“You’re not going to teach like that, are you?”
I was devastated. Did she not know the amount of preparation I had put into this lecture? Did she not know the number of resources I consulted as I was putting together the lecture? Did she not realize the number of times I had rehearsed the lecture before the “live” presentation?
Then she said something that stuck with me throughout my 35-year career as a teacher, school principal, and district administrator: “Scott, you must engage all of your learners to get the results you are after. You just can’t teach to those who want “A’s” while others fall asleep, either figuratively or literally.”
Switch to my first year of teaching and I’m sitting on the couch in the faculty lounge. A group of veteran teachers are telling me that the first order of business inside a classroom is to make sure that student discipline is addressed, and then the teacher can focus on instructional strategies and student engagement.
But whenever I focused on classroom discipline, my girlfriend’s advice – engage all of your learners to get the results you want – rang in my ears. After my first year of teaching, I flipped my focus and instead of concentrating on student discipline I focused on getting all of my students engaged in that day’s lesson.
What I learned my second year of teaching was this:
If you focus on strong instructional strategies, or to use a fishing analogy – make sure you have really good bait attached to your hook – then you are sure most if not all students will be interested in what they are learning and classroom management issues will be few and far between.
That lesson not only stuck with me for 35 years, but I shared it with hundreds if not thousands of teachers during my career.
So you can imagine my surprise at news shared in the RAND’s Corporation’s 2026 State of the American Teacher and the American Life Panel survey.
EdWeek reported last week that,
“A majority of teachers surveyed listed student misbehavior among the top three common causes of stress, higher than any other option. Students behavior was 20 percentage points more likely to be in teachers’ top three sources of stress than low pay, the next most common stressor.”
“Elizabeth Steiner, a RAND senior policy researcher and the lead author of the report, said student behavior has been a consistently high source of teacher stress for the last five years, and the research group plans to release more detailed data on teachers’ classroom-management challenges later this summer.”
Well, before the RAND researchers release the second part of their report, let me guess what their “more detailed data” is going to tell them.
First, like me as a student teacher and then a first-year classroom instructor, I’m guessing most of the teachers who struggle with classroom management issues are not the best at developing classroom strategies that engage all students to what that teacher wants them to learn.
Second, I’m guessing that the teachers struggling with classroom management issues have not found success in building strong relationships with all of their students.
Third, these teachers would benefit from building individualized learning plans with all of their young learners, allowing the learning plan to direct both the adult learning leader and their young learners as to how reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development can be improved upon.
40 years ago a young teacher in Texas learned the importance of prioritizing instructional strategies that led to deep learning over classroom management. That teacher was me. Based upon the RAND survey, it seems thousands of teachers today need to learn that same lesson.
I’ll be away until June 24th. Til then. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
Leave a comment