Assessing Classroom Management: Reflection Before Prescription

Summary for Educators

Based on Christine Sermons
Edutopia, September 8, 2026
A Rubric for Assessing Your Classroom Management Strengths and Weaknesses

Christine Sermons offers teachers a practical way to examine classroom management without immediately reaching for new rules, consequences, or packaged behavior systems. Her central tool is a self-assessment rubric she calls “status of the class,” designed to help teachers identify which parts of their classroom operation are working well and which deserve focused improvement. (Edutopia)

THE BIG IDEA

Classroom management improves when teachers treat it as a system to be examined rather than a problem to be “fixed.” Sermons’s approach asks educators to assess ten interconnected areas: classroom setup, routines, directions, time management, task supervision, academic interaction, instructional strategies, feedback, behavior strategies, and closure activities. (Edutopia)

That shift matters. A disruptive class period may not primarily be a behavior problem. The underlying cause might be unclear directions, awkward transitions, poor pacing, inadequate supervision, or routines that students have never fully learned. By breaking classroom management into observable practices, teachers can diagnose problems more precisely.

For school leaders, the larger lesson is equally important: effective coaching should begin with reflection and diagnosis, not prescription.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Classroom management is multidimensional. Sermons identifies ten separate areas teachers can evaluate rather than treating management as a single skill. (Edutopia)
• The fundamentals deserve special attention. For newer teachers in particular, she emphasizes classroom setup, routines, directions, time management, and task supervision as especially important foundational practices. (Edutopia)
• Specific procedures make reflection useful. Each broad category is divided into observable practices. Classroom setup, for example, includes teacher proximity, productive peer interaction, smooth transitions, and periodically reconsidering the room arrangement. (Edutopia)
• Teachers should not try to improve everything simultaneously. Sermons recommends identifying a limited number of weaker areas and working deliberately on those priorities. (Edutopia)
• Small experiments can produce meaningful improvement. A teacher struggling with time management might estimate how long each lesson component should take, test the plan for several days, take notes, adjust, and then expand the strategy. (Edutopia)
• Reassessment is essential. Classroom management should be viewed as an ongoing improvement cycle rather than a one-time intervention. (Edutopia)

WHY IT MATTERS

School leaders frequently enter classrooms when something has already gone wrong. Students are off task. Transitions are chaotic. A teacher is frustrated. Instruction is constantly interrupted.

The temptation is to prescribe a solution: tighten consequences, change the seating chart, call parents, create a new behavior plan.

Sermons’s framework suggests a better first question:

What part of the classroom system is producing the difficulty?

Consider a class in which students become disruptive between activities. The problem may appear to be student behavior, but an observer might discover that students do not know what they are supposed to do during transitions.

Or imagine students talking while directions are being given. Perhaps the teacher needs stronger consequences—but perhaps the directions are too long, unclear, or delivered before students are ready to listen.

This is why a rubric can be particularly valuable during instructional coaching. It turns a vague judgment—“You need better classroom management”—into a much more productive conversation:

Which routines are working? Where are students losing time? Which directions need clarification? When does engagement decline? What might we change first?

That is a conversation teachers can act on.

LEADERSHIP ACTIONS

1. Use the rubric before giving advice.
Ask teachers to identify their own classroom-management strengths and weaknesses before the administrator offers recommendations.

2. Look beyond student behavior during observations.
Pay close attention to routines, movement, directions, materials, transitions, pacing, supervision, and lesson closure.

3. Identify one high-leverage improvement.
Avoid overwhelming teachers with ten recommendations following an observation. Find the change most likely to improve several aspects of the classroom at once.

4. Model vulnerability.
Sermons describes sharing her own classroom-management strengths and weaknesses when working with teachers. (Edutopia) Administrators can do something similar by discussing areas of leadership practice they continue to refine.

5. Encourage short improvement cycles.
Choose a strategy, implement it for several days or weeks, gather evidence, adjust it, and reassess.

6. Make classroom management part of instructional coaching.
Management should not be discussed only when teachers are struggling. Efficient routines and productive learning environments are fundamental components of effective instruction.

LEADER REFLECTION

When you observe a classroom-management problem, what is your first instinct?

Do you immediately recommend a solution?

Or do you help the teacher determine which part of the classroom system is creating the problem?

The most useful administrator may not be the leader with the quickest answer.

It may be the leader who helps teachers ask the right questions.

Original Article——————————

Prepared with the assistance of AI software OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (5.2) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com