ABSTRACT
In order to understand interpersonal communication it is important to examine the ecological or contextual system in which it occurs. In educational terms, the immediate context for teachers is the classroom. Their natural communication partners are, of course, students. This thinking led us to evaluate and adopt general systems theory as a basis to analyze classroom communication. Systems concepts have been usefully employed in family therapy (Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson, 1967; Haley, 1963). Wubbels, Créton and Holvast (1988) demonstrated some of these ideas can be productively used in describing classroom situations.
