Classroom management continues to be a concern for educators, administrators, and policymakers. Although evidencebased classroom management practices exist, teachers often receive insufficient training and support to implement these practices successfully. Schools need reliable and efficient ways to support teachers' classroom management. This study employed a multiple baseline design across elementary teachers to investigate the effect of targeted professional development (TPD), an efficient approach that incorporated self-management and email prompts, on teachers' rates of specific praise. We replicated this study at a second elementary school to provide additional evidence of the efficacy of TPD. Across teachers in both schools, data support a functional relation between TPD and an increase in teachers' use of specific praise.

Teachers receive limited training and support in classroom management, making it incumbent on school leaders to provide efficient and effective professional development supports. We explored the effects of a brief targeted professional development (TPD) approach (brief training, email prompts, and self-management of trained skills) on teachers’ use of three empirically supported classroom management skills (prompts, opportunities to respond [OTR], and specific praise). Using an experimental crossover design, we documented that teachers increased their prompt and specific praise rates while they actively engaged in TPD. However, training effects did not maintain when TPD shifted to a new skill and teachers’ increased use of OTRs during TPD was neither statistically significant nor maintained. Teachers found TPD to be acceptable, usable, and feasible.

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Effective classroom management is critical for student and teacher success. Because teachers receive limited preservice preparation and in-service support in classroom management, educational leaders (e.g., school psychologists, behavior coaches, mentor teachers, and administrators) need efficient and effective tools to identify teachers’ strengths and needs and to guide professional development. Current approaches to assess teachers’ classroom management are either (a) simple and efficient, but have unknown psychometric properties, or (b) psychometrically sound, but resource intensive. Thus, a Classroom Management Observation Tool (CMOT) that is simple, efficient, and has promising psychometric properties would fill a critical need in the field. This article describes the initial development and validation of the CMOT—a four-item rating of teachers’ active supervision, opportunities to respond, specific praise, and positive to corrective ratio—and presents promising evidence of content validity, factor structure, interrater reliability, construct validity, and generalizability. Further research is needed to develop this tool for screening, progress monitoring, and other assessment purposes.