Some thoughts on schools, discipline and what we want in our schools as I struggle with trying to write the SLA Student Handbook…
A wise educational administrator once said to me, "Discipline is a hot air balloon, if you keep pumping air into it, it’ll keep taking it." Another administrator once told me, "If discipline is your first priority, you’ll never get to your second priority." And I think they were both right, and obviously, schools need a respectful learning environment, but if that comes before thinking about what you really want going on in your classrooms, you’ve put the cart before the horse.
I never have been very good at doing exactly what I’m told to do. I’m a very good worker when I work for someone who trusts me and gives me space to find my own way through what I’m supposed to do. But I’m really just enough of a pain in the neck when someone tries to tell me that there’s one way and one way only to do something. I think I taught that way too. Structure is good. Expectations are very good. But the standard procedure of "Rule -> Consequence, Rule -> Consequence, Lather -> Rinse -> Repeat" for several pages is, to me, not the kind of document that I want SLA to be about.
And I know we need to give kids a strong sense of what the boundaries are — and if we don’t want them to wear hats, we better tell them they can’t wear hats (for example). But I really would to have a student code of conduct that doesn’t say much more than this:
At SLA, we have come together to try to further each others knowledge, wisdom and abilities. To do that, we all need to feel safe, valued and respected. To that end, we offer the following three guidelines for student behavior:
1) Respect and care about yourself
2) Respect and care about the community and the other members in it.
3) Respect and care that we all are here to learn about ourselves and our world.All other specific guidelines for behavior stems from these simple statements.
Does it need to be any more complex than that?