ABSTRACT

As these quotations suggest, both students and teachers have strong beliefs about what it takes to be an effective manager. These individuals are the central participants in classroom interactions and their relationships are at the heart of classroom management concerns and consequences. To ignore the thinking of these important players is to court failure in teaching and teacher education. Fully understanding their perspectives should allow us to create better learning environments for both students and teachers. This chapter on the beliefs of students and teachers is located in a section about alternative paradigms, not because thework represents a particular paradigm, but because teachers’ and students’ perspectives are important in every paradigm. In fact, the research on teachers’ perspectives includes studies grounded in cognitive, process-product, ethnographic, narrative, and phenomenological approaches to research. The studies of students’ perspectives tend to be more paradigmatic, in that they share questions and research approaches, but here too there are some divergences in method.