As every teacher knows, good discipline is a key ingredient to academic success. It may even be the most important ingredient to good academics. The teacher’s job is to work with the students to understand the academics. If that gets detoured by having to take care of unruly students then everybody suffers. Students enjoy learning and they enjoy being in an atmosphere that encourages learning. Students don’t like being in an atmosphere where the students are fighting with the teacher. As the report, Teaching Discipline: A Toolkit for Educators on Positive Alternatives to Out-of-School Suspensions, indicates, “Perhaps most importantly, good discipline is essential to the emotional, social, and moral development of children.”

One of the classic approaches to classroom disciplinary problems has been kicking students out of school for a period of time as a means of punishment for bad behavior. We are now learning, from extensive research, that putting students out of school is not only ineffective, but also counterproductive.

Despite this research, students in Connecticut schools have been routinely suspended from school.  In 2006-2007 and again in 2007-2008, schoolchildren in Connecticut missed over 250,000 school days due to out-of-school suspensions; in 2005-2006, kindergarteners alone lost approximately 2,000 days. In 2006-2007, 60 percent of out-of-school suspensions were for school policy violations, including truancy and disrespect.

The goal of the research in Teaching Discipline is to share the ideas and best practices utilized by classroom teachers in Connecticut schools to lessen the number of out-of-school suspensions in the Connecticut schools. Much of what is reported in this research is the result of teachers working hard to come up with a better way to teach discipline.

Their ideas and practices seem to be working. The out-of-school suspension rates in Connecticut have been decreasing over the past three years. In 2006-7 the rate was 7.1 percent, in 2007-8 it was 6.0 percent, and 2008-9 it dropped down to 5.4 percent.

The research shows that the students who most often are kicked out of school for disciplinary reason are the same students who are having academic problems. They are the students who need extra time in school, not less. In Connecticut, the gap in achievement between poor students and non-poor students is one of the largest in the country. It is only through very hard work on the part of the teacher that this gap has begun to close. The teacher understands that these students cannot be out of school.

 

In Connecticut many schools have made it their goal to reduce the number of out-of-school suspensions in the past few years. This has been done through a series of interventions and teacher-created strategies. Some of the common approaches to this problem emerge:

The goal of this report is not to provide endorsement for particular discipline strategies, but rather to encourage schools to create their own solutions. When teachers feel support to use their own experience to create a solution they are more apt to be successful.

As the report concludes: “Issues of school discipline in Connecticut remain very challenging. Yet the educators we interviewed expressed – and inspired – a tremendous amount of confidence that the problem of school discipline can be tackled and solved like any other problem. These educators have proven that good discipline can indeed by taught.”

Source: Teaching Discipline: A Toolkit for Educators on Positive Alternatives to Out-of-School Suspensions