A Culture of School Discipline

April 19th, 2010 By: Suzanne Tingley in Administration, Articles, Classroom Management

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The committee of teachers who interviewed me for the high school principal’s job had the usual questions, but it was clear that they all shared one overriding concern. “How do you feel about discipline?” is the way one teacher put it.

Feel about it? How do I feel about it? “Well,” I answered truthfully, “I’m not sure what you mean, but I will say that without good discipline in a school very little learning takes place.” I went on to talk about the importance of a good school discipline plan, of consistency, of communication with parents. All the while I was wondering, why is this such a major issue here?

It was a small rural high school, and frankly, I figured the kids would be pretty well behaved. My first week on the job was a real eye-opener. There were fights in the halls. The f-word was part of everyday speech. Kids were disrespectful to teachers, and teachers were impatient with kids. One teacher pushed a student against the lockers. My office was inundated with discipline referrals.

I had taken the job with dreams of developing curriculum, upgrading technology, and implementing new initiatives. It was abundantly clear in a few days that nothing like this was going to happen until we got the house in order.

The first thing I did was meet with the faculty to address the issue of discipline directly. They knew they had lost control of the situation and were ready to offer full cooperation to restore order. We put together a committee composed of teachers, staff, parents, and students to develop a school discipline plan. The money I had planned to spend on curriculum development went to classroom management training. When the plan was finished, my assistant and I talked with students in small groups to explain the plan. We mailed the plan to every home and held several open forums for parents to ask questions. It became clear that most students and parents supported the plan, and many seemed relieved that order might be restored in the high school.

Things were a little rough that first month as students tested the plan. The turning point came in November at a home basketball game. Our team lost, and at the end of the game one of our students, on a dare, jumped out of the stands and punched the opposing point guard, breaking his nose. The incident occurred literally before hundreds of people – students, faculty, parents, and community members – all of whom would be watching to see what happened next.

Untoward incidents like this were covered in the school-wide discipline plan, and we simply followed the guidelines. We had been careful to check with our school’s attorney to be sure that our plan adhered to state education regulations before our school board adopted the discipline plan. Consequently, we knew it was within the school’s purview to hold a disciplinary hearing and suspend the student (with home instruction) for a substantial amount of time. You can be sure that the students, along with everybody else in the community, knew then that we were serious about our behavioral expectations.

Of course, the question is, how does a school get to the point that my school was at when I first arrived? In this particular case, there had been a series of administrative turnovers, so every couple of years the priorities changed. There was no adopted discipline code, so school discipline was something that was randomly applied to individual students rather than a part of the entire school culture. Teachers felt that they were not supported by administration, and some students realized that there were few in any consequences for poor behavior (the student who hit the opposing player earned the first suspension in years). Some teachers just gave up; others became angry. Still others were intimidated. Teacher absenteeism was high.

Caught in the middle were the kids who just wanted to come to school every day to learn and socialize in a safe environment.

The school turnaround didn’t occur overnight, but at the end of two years of consistent application of the discipline plan, things greatly improved. Besides working with students and parents, the assistant principal and I also worked closely with individual teachers who had developed some bad habits in their interactions with students. We addressed directly the issue of forcing kids into a corner so that they felt they had to save face by being disrespectful. We talked with teachers about speaking individually to students and not embarrassing them in front of others. Changing some of these habits that had developed over the years took time, but eventually teachers and staff recognized that the behavioral expectations of the school culture applied to students and the adults who worked with them. Poor choices carried consequences for both.

Before coming to this school, I had been fortunate enough to work in other schools, both as a teacher and an administrator, that were well-run with clear behavioral expectations. I knew what school discipline was supposed to look like, and I also knew that the great majority of kids don’t like confrontation, don’t want classes disrupted, and don’t want trouble. They want to have input and freedom, but they want the adults to be in charge.

As it turns out, kids and adults actually do have more freedom to learn, to interact with one another, to experiment, and to simply laugh and have fun when behavioral expectations are part of the everyday school culture. Above all else, our students deserved to learn in a safe environment.

How does your ideal principal feel about student discipline? How does your ideal principal handle the f-word or student-teacher disrespect? How do you handle it in your classroom? Please share your stories in the comments for all of us to benefit.

Retired superintendent and former teacher Suzanne Tingley is the author of How to Handle Difficult Parents: A Teacher’s Survival Guide (Cottonwood Press 2006). You can read her blog, Practical Leadership, in Scholastic’s Administrator’s section. http://blogs.scholastic.com/practical_leadership/

Tags: consistency parent communication, discipline, discipline plan, fighting

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