Jacob Kounin

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Jacob Kounin is an educational theorist who focused on the management and organization skills of the teacher. His work focused on identifying teacher behaviors that led to productive learning environments and was instrumental in changing the thinking of teachers in regards to responding to misbehavior and most importantly preventing misbehavior (Eggen and Kauchak, 2001). Kounin believed that if students were engaged in their lessons, they would be less likely to misbehave, thus putting the responsibility on the teacher to prevent and stop behavior problems before they started.
In the beginning of his research, Kounin set out to see how teachers handled misbehavior. Kounin studied thousands of videotapes of classrooms that had minimum misbehavior and classrooms where students were often disengaged and disruptive. The videotapes were then analyzed to determine how teachers in these two different classrooms did things differently. While there were no systematic differences between the two classrooms, it was found that effective classrooms had teachers that used various teaching methods to keep students engaged, thus preventing disruptive behavior. Kounin discovered that teachers that were better prepared, made material stimulating, created smoother transitions amongst lessons and had great classroom awareness were more effective …show more content…

Kounin concluded that some teachers are better classroom leaders because of skill in four areas: “withitness,” overlapping activities, group focusing, and movement management (Charles, 2002). Withitness is the ability of the teacher to have awareness of the classroom at all times, what is often known as “having eyes in the back of her head”. Teachers are able to immediately respond to misbehavior and often know who started it and can prevent minor disruptions from becoming major (Pressman,

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