In the early 1950s, Louis Raths anticipated a line of inquiry pursued in the following decade by researchers Jacob Kounin and Paul Gump (1962). Their research problem centered on teachers’ desists — injunctions on the teachers’ part for students to stop their misbehavior, e.g., passing notes, chewing gum, talking out of turn, texting, attending to cell phones, and so on. It has been well known, for decades, that some desists work and others do not; further, that for some teachers, desists work and for other teachers, those same desists are not effective. The question then is, “What makes some desists effective and others not effective?”
Initially, Kounin and Gump (1962) hypothesized that the nature of the desist determined its efficacy. Desists were categorized as clear, firm, and/or rough. The clarity of a desist was seen as a key factor. For a teacher to say, “Stop it,” was less effective as a desist than one that was worded, “Stop passing notes, now.” This latter example has qualities of clarity — what the student should stop doing and when he should stop doing it. A rough desist had an edge or element of shrillness to it that created greater tension or negative affect in the classroom and likely more classroom management problems.
Building earlier on the work of noted sociologists, most notably George Homans (1950), Raths (1954) developed a theory related to power in small groups, and particularly the power ceded by the students to the teacher’s authority. Raths noted that “All serious writers about power speak of its interpersonal nature and its reciprocal relationships: to have power one must be empowered. The power comes from others” (1954, p. 97). Raths recognized that desists work when teachers have earned the trust of their students. In sum, pupils respond to desists by choice, when they sense that the teacher merits their acquiescence. Raths’ theory of power in the classroom goes something like this:
- Teachers do not have power over their students. Students yield authority to their teachers, not to all teachers, but to some teachers, and not to others.
- Students yield power to teachers who behave in ways that are in line with student expectations, particularly with respect to the classroom status system. As teachers conform to student norms, they develop in Homans’ term a “zone of indifference.” In this respect, at least initially, teachers are the least free individuals in a classroom. Teachers need to conform. Raths (1954) postulates about the leadership of small groups’ status hierarchies in general: “To preserve itself, leadership utilizes these inequalities; in part it tends to preserve them” (p. 98).
- The status system(s) within a group is established with the consent of the class members. They are based on inequalities found within any group. Analogously, Raths argued that a successful football team could not be composed of all linemen, no matter how well they performed. Kickers, passers, and receivers must also be part of a team if it is to be successful. So in a classroom, there are many different categories of successful performance — mathematics, art, story telling, science, reading aloud, music, dancing, and so on. A teacher who helps students recognize the leaders in these, and similar areas, and who makes public that he knows who excels in them, is granted credit by the class in the “zone of indifference.” Teachers who achieve this status have provided students with the opportunity to know who excels in the various status areas, and have acted in ways to recognize (reward) those students determined by their classmates to be leaders in those areas. For example, a teacher would not make someone who is a good artist captain of the class softball team. Instead, the teacher would appoint the person who the class sees as the best softball player. In other words, “group effectiveness is likely to be superior in those situations where the operations of the group leaders support the several status systems created by the members of the group” (1954, p. 98).
- In subsequent research, Kounin recognized that the efficacy of desists reflects in part on a teacher’s “withitness” – the ability to accurately discern what is going on within the group (Kounin, 1970). Teachers who offer desists to the incorrect student, i.e., tells Johnny to stop passing notes, when it was really Bill who was guilty, lose power by virtue of their lack of withitness.
Raths’ theory was tested in a number of ways — and in a number of settings. Two doctoral students, Isidore Bogen (1954) and Lucy Polansky (1954) conducted research on two different aspects of the power theory. Bogen’s research investigated teachers’ knowledge of student status hierarchies in relation to group morale or climate. Students in classrooms were asked to name the class’ best artist, musician, reader, story teller, baseball player, and so on. The student nominations were collected by a research assistant. Simultaneously, the teacher was asked to respond to the same prompts. It turned out that some teachers had almost 90% agreements with their students, while other teachers had only a 30% agreement score. Comparisons were then made about desist efficacy, absentee-ism, detentions assigned by the teachers, and other measures of class morale. The theory predicted that the teacher who recognized the inequalities in a group would manifest the better indicators. For the most part, those predictions were sustained. Polansky studied whether teachers give high status students more verbal support than low status students. Generally, those teachers that created higher group morale provided more verbal support to high status students.
The same technique was used to compare the leadership of principals in elementary schools. Those principals who knew the inequalities among their teacher faculties were seen as more successful than principals who were less able to recognize the naturally occurring inequalities found within the faculty. (Davis, University of Maryland. Get references).
Note: This account tells a story about this line of research, but it must be acknowledged that Raths’ paper on “power” preceded the Kounin and Gump work by 10 years or so. Raths did not publicize his work through the publication of booklets, such as he did with the “needs theory,” nor did he write books about it as he did with the values and thinking areas. His work in power gains significance, as we have written above, as a precursor to the work of Kounin and Gump’s (1962) and Kounin’s (1970) later work, which treated classroom management from a sociological perspective. Important contemporary work on classroom status and group functioning would include Elizabeth Cohen’s (1994) work on designing group work in heterogeneous classrooms.
References
Bogen, I. (1954). Pupil-teacher rapport and the teacher’s awareness of status structures within the group. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 28(3), 104-114. doi:10.2307/2263927
Cohen, E. (1994). Designing groupwork, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Homans, G. (1950) The human group. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Kounin, J.S. (1970). Discipline and group management in classrooms. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Kounin, J. S., & Gump, P. V. (1962). The ripple effect in discipline. Elementary School Journal, LIX(3), 158-62.
Polansky, L. (1954). Group social climate and the teacher’s supportiveness of group status systems. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 28(3), 115-123. doi:10.2307/2263928
Raths, L. E. (1954). Power in small groups. Journal of Educational Sociology, 28(3), 97-103.
Louis E. Raths 