and many were concerned about daily issues
that were visible to them. We invited parents
to participate after the committee had been
working for a few months.
Guideline No. 2 – Communicate
expectations but avoid being
autocratic.
“All students belong to all teachers” was
an early agreement in our committee. It is
up to the principal to communicate this kind
of expectation, and to speak to teachers who
turn a blind eye to problems because they do
not have the students in their own classes.
Another expectation I personally set was,
“We extend the social graces to everyone,”
because my school had a history of teacher
factions. Some teachers had actually not
spoken to one another in years.
In a staff meeting, I asked every teacher
to bury the hatchet, make eye contact and
greet every colleague they met, whenever
and wherever they met them. And they
did! Wounds were not healed overnight, of
course, and occasional interpersonal prob-
lems still demanded my attention, but point-
ing out the elephant in the room at one of my
first staff meetings was a turning point that
many teachers remarked on.
Today more than ever, a staff must work
together as a team. If a principal feels that
spending his or her time addressing inter-
personal problems between teachers is not
worthy of a principal’s attention, deep di-
vides can develop, making improvement
difficult and unlikely to be sustained.
Guideline No. 3 – Work from a
position of respect.
This was a major philosophical chal-
lenge for some individuals on my staff,
who felt that every misbehavior should be
punished, and who caused a great number
of their own discipline problems by creat-
ing power struggles with students over the
smallest infraction.
Under Ms. Ruis’ leadership, I had been
very inf luenced by Curwin and Mendler’s
“Discipline with Dignity” and the concepts of
logical consequences: If you stand in the rain,
you get wet. Logical consequences are corner-
stones of providing discipline with dignity.
An example would be to have a student
Creating positive
relationships with
students, and helping
staff members do the
same, pays dividends.
who made a mess with ketchup at lunch
clean it up. Making the student clean all the
tables in the cafeteria is not logical, not rea-
sonable or respectful. All consequences and
interactions with students must be respect-
ful, and a logical consequence must be deliv-
ered respectfully.
I modeled many examples of student
discipline situations in staff meetings, and
asked teachers to role-play effective, re-
spectful responses with each other using
additional examples. Further PD on skills
like using body language and proximity to
redirect, instead of calling students down
across the room, may be needed for some
staff members who continue to create their
own discipline problems.
At my school, being present in the caf-
eteria to model for noon duty supervisors
how to redirect students without yelling was
necessary on every day I could make it. In
the early days, one supervisor said, “They’re
so much better when you’re in here.” Creat-
ing positive relationships with students, and
helping staff members do the same, pays
dividends.
Guideline No. 4 – Instruction
comes first.
This may seem patently obvious, but it is
not always apparent in the thinking behind
some discipline systems. For example, one
high school I worked with used a time-out
room for tardy students. The students spent
the entire period sitting at empty desks and
doing nothing, while a paraprofessional staff
member ensured that they did nothing – an
expensive and completely counterproductive
strategy. Some students were missing entire
periods of instruction on a daily basis.
My own school had a staggering record of
student suspensions, with students missing
full days of instruction, often unsupervised
at home. Your committee is your brain trust.
Many innovative, alternative solutions that
do not negatively impact instruction reside
in their collective wisdom, beyond your
committee, in other schools, and in innu-
merable internet resources available to aug-
ment their ideas.
Guideline No. 5 – Make student
behavior expectations explicit and
public.
Many playground fights originated on the
basketball court, and short of adding extra
teacher duties to closely supervise it, past
practice when fights occurred had been to
punish all the students by not allowing bas-
ketball at recess or lunch for a specified pe-
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