Rethinking Discipline - Gone are the days when teachers can threaten kids with the strap

School discipline presents enormous challenges for teachers. Getting it right takes balance, judgment, and wisdom. As an education professional who has been studying discipline in an educational setting for years, I am concerned by the lack of theoretical grounding in this realm. Given how much research goes into all other areas of a teacher’s job, this deficiency in what many see as a key part of their role is certainly the one that causes most sleepless nights.

The general consensus is that the ways that you can use discipline will change as your child grows and develops. Under the age of one year, babies don’t really understand right from wrong. So when your baby pulls your hair, you might say ‘no’. You’ll probably need to do this over and over again. Punishing or using negative consequences for babies doesn’t work, because they don’t understand what they’ve done. From around the age of one year, toddlers start to understand a bit more about cause and effect. Your toddler might sometimes do something to get a reaction – for example, throwing food or having a tantrum. From the age of three years, preschoolers often also start spending more time away from home (at preschool and playgroup), so they get more chances to test out acceptable social behaviour. School-age children might know how to behave in different places – for example, school, home or sport club. But they still need you to remind them of the limits and reward them for good behaviour. 

For many years, teachers have relied on intervention strategies, such as rewards and sanctions, to promote compliant behaviour. This approach might seem sensible. However, all children are different; they respond to discipline in different ways. There will never be one approach that can be applied across all schools and classrooms. Rather than being based on evidence, discipline policies rely on a behaviorist approach: that if behaviour is reinforced it will continue and if it is not reinforced it will stop. Surprisingly enough, however, behavior policies have no real theoretical basis at all. That is great if you are training dogs but not when you are dealing with students. Students may learn that bad behaviour has consequences, but they are not learning how to behave better. While the use of praise is widely supported by research, there is little evidence on the effectiveness of different punishments in schools. Sometimes punishment is required if a student chooses to break the rules of the classroom. If the teacher chooses to correct the behaviour by using punishment, it is important to focus on correcting the behaviour for future learning rather than just punishing the student. Negative reinforcement punishment techniques tend to treat discipline as a single act but discipline is really a process and a general way of behaving. Negative reinforcement, like punishment, can make a student feel ashamed because students may get the message that they are the problem. 
As a teacher, one of the most common question I get from parents is: How can we guide  children without punishment? Parents are often surprised to hear that most of what we think of as discipline doesn't help kids become responsible, self-disciplined people. If there is one thing that my experience has taught me, it is that negative reinforcement techniques rarely prevent misbehaviour in the future and negatively affect teacher-student relationships. 

Good Suggestions For Improving Discipline
-Treat discipline as a teaching opportunity.
-Address behaviour in an individualized fashion.
-Be warm, kind, and friendly–but never familiar. 
-Be alert and observant. Maintain eye contact with students. 
-Raise your eyebrow–never your voice. 
-Keep students busy and involved. Students get bored when they have to do the same thing for too long.
-Make learning fun. 

Remember: No rule, however wise, is a substitute for affection.

Written & Edited by E.Kerr