Beyond Classroom Management: Building Your School-Wide Discipline System

By the third school year of her first teaching job, Laurie Boyd had lost complete control of one high school English class.

“I did not know how to manage my classroom or discipline teenagers. I took their playful and disruptive behavior personally. Even though I knew my content and could deliver an effective lesson, I was miserable as a teacher. Believing I was not cut out for the classroom, I was relieved when the district dissolved my position, due to staff reductions, at the close of that school year.”

Fifteen years later, Laurie accepted a long-term substitute teacher position, the fourth in a sequence of substitute teachers, who had been run out of a hard-to-staff, urban middle school by the extreme misbehavior of the students.

For three years, first as a sub and then as an English teacher at her first school, Laurie learned that a clearly communicated, fair system of procedures, routines, rules, and consequences regulated the behavior of most of her students. She learned to implement her system consistently and without rancor or frustration, no matter what. She survived power struggles and learned to take advantage of teachable moments about behavior as well as academics.

Eventually, Laurie became principal of that middle school. A critical core of caring, committed faculty members helped her to reduce the number of their school’s student suspension days from 4,000 to 400 in three years’ time and to transform the climate of their school. Laurie’s staff built many life-altering partnerships with their students over the next several years.

When she was moved from that school to another district middle school, Laurie interviewed her new teachers about what they thought their priorities should be for the coming school year. Nearly every teacher wanted her to focus on student behavior. When school started that August, Laurie was surprised by the “us-against-them” climate between youngsters and adults in the building. The kids seemed to be largely unmoved by the communication and actions of the grown-ups. The two populations seemed to move in parallel universes.

Laurie built on her experiences of developing a system of disciplinary support for her new school. She became very explicit with her expectations for teachers’ implementation of their system, more routine with her monitoring of their performance, and more immediate in her response to teachers who struggled with discipline. At the same time, she began to create specific protocols for her staff to use in addressing certain student profiles, such as the student who refuses to work. She and her staff created separate programs for students whose chronic misbehavior would otherwise result in long-term suspension or expulsion.

University programs and district professional development programs do not adequately prepare school administrators to lead in this area of schooling. And yet, student misbehavior and lack of administrator support are among the main reasons that teachers leave the profession. School leaders cannot afford to operate as if only a few kids misbehave, and only infrequently. Teachers need comprehensive, knowledgeable, effective support from administrators in order to ensure a productive learning environment in their school. It does not just happen on its own.

Any leader who recognizes the need for increased structure and a working system for his or her school will find help in this book. Any teacher who is trying to find his or her way to more effective classroom management, and who needs support for developing effective discipline structures will find help in this book. School teams who are developing components of a Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) plan will find help in this book.

In Beyond Classroom Management, Laurie Boyd makes a strong case for her philosophy about student discipline: If we care, we discipline – kindly, firmly, and consistently. Discipline is love.