ABSTRACT
The obligation of any chapter in thisHandbook is to provide the reader with a survey, appraisal, and, where possible, a synthesis of what is known about a specific topic within the domain of classroom management, in this case, classroom management in early childhood and elementary classrooms. On the surface, meeting this obligation seems relatively straightforward. But early childhood and elementary classroom management is not a mature field situated within a disciplinary community that might give rise to a rigorous and substantial body of tightly reasoned scholarly texts and refereed research reports. Rather, it has been fundamentally a practical matter that exists primarily at the point of service in schools, among mostly women and children far from the towers of academe, and usually becomes an issue mainly for school building administrators largely when it fails, that is, when misbehavior occurs and classroom life is disrupted. Those who actually do classroom management have little time or incentive to write about it. Those who write about it represent a wide range of backgrounds and specialties and are typically motivated to fix it, to improve how classrooms are managed. So the literatures that have evolved represent a wide diversity of intellectual and practical traditions from which a range of sometimes conflicting ideas and suggestions have been extrapolated.
