Care and Consequences

It may be the silliest false dichotomy in education. 

Do we bury toss aside the school disciplinary system for a truckload of warm, fuzzy sensitivity, or do we handle the misbehaving children with a traditional authoritarian round of showin' them who's boss?

I would love to say that both of these are gross overstatements, but, of course, they are not. Beyond the assorted hard-core authoritarian administrators out there, we've seen entire schools modeled on "no excuses," which at its most extreme means "I don't want to hear about your troubles, kid. Just knuckle under and do as you're told." And the anecdotal record of principals who send the offending student back to class with a lollipop, or won't take action until the teacher has forty-seven pieces of documentation and a certified "built a relationship with the student" story-- well, I'm pretty sure that every working teacher has stories.

Despite the advent of new languages for these extremes, they are not new at all. I've worked for both, and those days are at least 25 years in the rear view mirror.

The two poles are always discussed in the most extreme terms (much as I have so far), and I think that's because to people who disagree, the other side seems very extreme, and I think it seems very extreme because the correct answer in the real world is (once again) All Of The Above.

There is no question that when students act out, they are delivering a message and/or expressing a need. But that does not mean they should not experience consequences. For one thing, many times the message is that they would benefit from, even like to see, some structure and guardrails in the classroom. For another, the other students deserve a classroom in which they too are safe and able to learn. Consequences for the choices they make and the actions they take are a useful and necessary tool in the classroom.

At the same time, consequences that do not take into account whatever needs and pressures and traumas inform the child's behavior are blunt instruments that are destined to be less effective. As one of my principals frequently demonstrated, simply trying to hammer a child into submission creates far more problems than it solves. 

"Build a relationship" can mean an awful lot of things, but for teachers and students, mutual respect is the ideal. Respect includes a lot of features, but it doesn't include saying "I'm going to treat you like someone I can't expect to behave like a civilized person" and it doesn't include "I'm going to treat you like some kind of savage that must be broken and overpowered." 

Care and consequences are both a necessary piece of the disciplinary puzzle. Teachers and administrators absolutely can, and should, understand what message is contained in student behavior AND have the students face consequences for those actions. Teachers have to find their own way to balance. Teachers starting out are often reluctant to be "mean," but most figure out that it's not "mean" to create some order in the classroom (there is also an oft-noted phenomenon where a teacher tries to be too soft and eventually explodes all over the room). Teachers have to learn how their stern selves (which most 22-year-olds have little practice in performing) plays in the room. I found that what felt to me like a mild rebuke hit my students like a brutal beatdown. 

But I have never met anyone effective in a classroom who did not do both care and consequence. I have met zero effective teachers who were all one or the other. It would probably be useful have conversations that acknowledged what's needed is a proper balance rather than talking as if one or the other needs to be obliterated (or even successfully can be).But that is one of the scourges of education discussions--framed to often as either-or when they really should be about balancing both-and.