David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

bad apples at all. They only start to misbehave well into the lesson, and only in response to the way Stella is behaving. Stella causes the crisis. How so? By doing an appalling job of teaching the lesson.
    Stella had the girl from the class reading alongside her as a way of engaging the rest of the students. But the pacing of the back-and-forth between the two of them was excruciatingly slow and wooden. “Look at her body language,” one of the Virginia researchers, Bridget Hamre, said as we watched Stella. “Right now she is just talking to this one kid, and no one else is getting in.” Her colleague Robert Pianta added: “There’s no rhythm. No pace. This is going nowhere. There is no value in what she’s doing.”
    Only then did the class begin to deteriorate. The little boy started making faces. When the child started doing cartwheels, Stella missed it entirely. Three or four students to the immediate right of the teacher were still gamely trying to follow along, but Stella was so locked onto the book that she wasn’t giving them any encouragement. Meanwhile, to Stella’s left, five or six children had turned themselves around. But that was because they were bewildered, not because they were disobedient. Their view of the book was completely blocked by the little girl standing in front of Stella. They had no way of following along. We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
    “With classrooms like this one, people will call what is happening a behavioral issue,” Hamre said. We were watching one of Stella’s kids wiggling and squirming and contorting her face and altogether doing whatever she could to avoid her teacher. “But one of the things we find is that this sort of thing is more often an engagement problem than a behavioral problem. If the teacher is actually doing something interesting, these kids are quite capable of being engaged. Instead of responding in a ‘let me control your behavior’ way, the teacher needs to think, ‘How can I do something interesting that will prevent you from misbehaving in the first place?’”
    The next video Pianta and Hamre played was of a third-grade teacher giving homework to her students. Each student was given a copy of the assignment, and the teacher and the class read the instructions aloud together. Pianta was aghast. “Just the idea that you would be choral reading a set of instructions to a bunch of eight-year-olds is almost disrespectful,” he said. “I mean, why? Is there any instructional purpose?” They know how to read. It is like a waiter in a restaurant giving you the menu and then proceeding to read every item to you just as it appears on the page.
    A boy sitting next to the teacher raises his hand midway through the reading, and without looking at him, the teacher reaches out, grabs his wrist, and pushes his hand back down. Another child starts to actually do the assignment—an entirely logical action, given the pointlessness of what the teacher is doing. The teacher addresses him, sharply. “Sweetie. This is home work.” It was a moment of discipline. The child had broken the rules. The teacher had responded, firmly and immediately. If you were to watch that moment with the sound turned off, you would think of it as Leites and Wolf perfectly applied. But if you were to listen to what the teacher was saying and think about the incident from the child’s perspective, it would become clear that it is having anything but its intended effect. The little boy isn’t going to come away with a renewed appreciation of the importance of following the rules. He is going to come away angry and disillusioned. Why? Because the punishment is completely arbitrary. He can’t speak up and give his own side of the story. And wants to learn. If that little boy became defiant, it was because his teacher made him that way, just as Stella turned an eager and attentive student into someone who did cartwheels across the floor. When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
    This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like