This chapter explores consequences of the traditional and culturally responsive classroom management strategies reviewed in Chapter 11 from an action science perspective in depth. In the action science literature, action strategies that individuals use from the Model I perspective seek to: (1) design and manage the environment so that the actor is in control, (2) own and control tasks, (3) unilaterally protect themselves, and (4) unilaterally protect others from being hurt (i.e., upset, offended). Individual action strategies used from the Model II perspective seek to: (a) design situations in which they can experience high personal causation, (b) jointly control tasks, (c) understand protection of self as a joint, growth-oriented enterprise, and (d) bilaterally protect others. In this chapter, I substantiate these associations in the data by exploring how traditional and culturally responsive classroom management strategies are behavioral expressions of Model I and Model II values respectively – with corresponding consequences for CUNY instructors’ learning effectively across student–teacher cultural differences.

This chapter introduces action science as a novel approach to reconciling the knowing–doing gap presented in the Introduction. It reviews primary goals of this discipline as established in its seminal literature, as well as central tenets and terms in this discipline that are foundational to the analyses featured throughout the book. It also presents evidence that action science is a suitable approach to reconciling this knowing–doing gap, because its central tenets and terms speak to consistent and recurring themes in the extant educational literature. I explain how the ladder-of-inference framework from this literature is used to investigate K-12 urban teachers’ inferential thinking about cultural differences in the literature review featured across the next six chapters.