Fernando, a brilliant mentor in our partnership, is often heard to say that his mentees, need to teach with ‘purpose not power’.
Beginning teachers often find classroom management hard, struggling with the idea they have the right to ask for and expect pupils to follow their instructions. Usually this is because they think classroom management is about how pupils perceive their power and authority. However, experienced teachers know that effective classroom management rarely comes from power. It comes from purpose: ‘the legitimacy of teachers as authority figures is not something that can be assumed but rather is granted during the course of ongoing interactions with students’ (Pace & Hemmings, 2007, p.21). Fernando knows this because he was once the kind of child for whom understanding the purpose made all the difference.
A purposeful classroom is one in which pupils know where they are going, why they are doing what they are doing, and how every action contributes to learning. When pupils understand the direction of travel, and when teachers make the ‘why’ visible, routines and behaviour begin to feel less like compliance and more like a shared and collective momentum. For beginning teachers, cultivating this sense of purpose isn’t just helpful—it can be transformative.
Narrating purpose, not asserting dominance
Beginning teachers often feel that redirecting behaviour requires sternness or gravitas. But, in reality, the most effective redirection is calm, transparent and purposeful. Consider the difference between:
“Stop talking.”
and
“You need to stop talking and listen while your classmate reads. To not do so is disrespectful and will mean you miss the key information you need for the next task.”
Notice how the second example connects the behavioural expectation explicitly to:
- the dignity and rights of others,
- the demands of the work,
- and the learning that follows.
This is not about winning a battle of wills. It is about anchoring expectations in learning. Pupils, respond far more positively when they understand the reason behind what is being asked of them. When beginning teachers narrate purpose clearly and consistently, they reduce conflict, minimise resistance to their instructions, and help pupils understand that behaviour is not about the adult’s authority—it’s about their own learning and the learning of their class community.
Planning for purpose: knowing what every task is doing
Experienced teachers know that this clarity of purpose doesn’t magically appear in the classroom. It begins long before pupils enter the room with the planning.
Beginning teachers will often be asked to teach lessons from well-established schemes of work or school resources. While this can be a gift, it carries a risk: if you don’t fully understand why certain tasks exist, or how they help pupils meet the lesson objective, then the tasks can easily become disconnected activities rather than steps towards learning.
Purposeful planning requires beginning teachers to ask:
- What is the core takeaway, the learning, that pupils need to achieve through this lesson?
- How is each activity helping pupils build towards achieving that goal?
- Which tasks are doing the heavy lifting?
- What misconceptions are these tasks anticipating or revealing?
Without this understanding, it is very difficult to articulate purpose to pupils—or to make in lesson adaptations or manage behaviour effectively when things go off track.
When you do understand the purpose of each stage of a lesson, it becomes much easier to explain to pupils why they are annotating a source, or why they are discussing a particular question with a partner, or why a short quiz matters. And when pupils are aware of the purpose their buy-in usually increases too.
Helping pupils see the journey: lesson, sequence, curriculum
Beginning teachers don’t just need to think about how the tasks within a lesson incrementally build towards the learning outcomes, they also need to zoom out and understand the bigger picture and the purposes that lie beneath that too. .
This means being explicit about:
- How today’s lesson links to yesterday’s
(“We’re adding another layer to our understanding of medieval kingship…”) - How today’s content prepares them for what is coming
(“Tomorrow, you’ll be using this evidence to construct your argument.”) - How this enquiry fits into the wider curriculum
(“This links to the theme of power and control that you’ll revisit throughout Year 9 and into GCSE.”)
When pupils see themselves as participants in a coherent journey of learning—rather than simply completing disconnected tasks for the sake of filling an hour – the classroom climate improves, motivation increases, and teacher authority becomes grounded in a collective sense of purpose.
Purpose as a classroom culture
A purposeful classroom is structured and meaningful. Pupils know:
- what success looks like,
- what their teacher is aiming for,
- and why their effort matters.
Beginning teachers sometimes worry that being transparent or explanatory will make them appear less authoritative. In fact, the opposite is true. Authority grounded in purpose is far stronger, far calmer and far more sustainable than authority grounded in power.
Reference:
Pace, J. L., & Hemmings, A. (2007). Understanding Authority in Classrooms: A Review of Theory, Ideology, and Research. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 4–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4624886
Becoming a History Teacher 