Sociology and the Classroom: Setting the Conditions for Teacher-Student Interaction

In talking about the contribution of sociology to the study of the classroom I would like to make two choices. The first is a restriction to the problem of understanding the relationship between classroom teaching and student growth or learning. This is the critical question for the educational reformers, for the policy makers trying to decide how to invest public moneys and for the society now demanding a much higher success rate in public education than has been achieved in the past. Because it is such an imperative question for applied educational research, I would like to confine myself to the contribution of sociology to the understanding of effectiveness in teaching. Secondly, I would like to restrict myself to non-individual factors arising from the formal and informal social structure of the classroom. Behavioral scientists have been concerned with characteristics of individuals as explanations for success or failure in the classroom-