discipline

Student behavior makes teaching harder than ever

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Hilderbrand Pelzer III once taught in a juvenile detention center. Now, as a principal, he says that student behavior in Philadelphia schools makes teaching harder than ever.

Pelzer quotes the principal of the Bensalem Youth Development Center School where he once worked: “It only takes one student to destroy and demoralize the learning environment.” In Philadelphia, officials estimate that more than half of all students have experienced a major traumatic event, according to the Philadelphia Citizen. With that many student needs, building and sustaining a thriving school climate can be a herculean effort.

Pelzer cites the Child Mind Institute, which says that about 10% of the school population nationally struggles with mental health problems. But only about one in three teachers think they have the skills to handle mental health issues.

Last year a group of teachers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, shared stories of getting beaten up by students as young as six. Forty-five teachers resigned between July and October, 2017.

Pelzer writes: “A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Consortium for Policy Research in Education found that teachers overwhelmingly think that suspensions helped them manage their classrooms.” In some schools, truancy has risen with the abolition of suspensions for minor infractions, and academic success among students not previously suspended has declined.

UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Guhin has observed similar patterns in urban public schools around the United States, though teachers are doing their best to connect with students and address the underlying issues.  He writes in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture book The Content of Their Character that “there were often heroic commitments by teachers to show compassion to their students and to model such a compassionate life as a meaningful way to live.” Indeed, Pelzer and many others continue to make those heroic commitments, setting an example for their students.

In Pelzer’s school, “distressed students struggle to follow basic instructions, and have difficulty focusing their attention on organizing, planning and completing tasks.” The burden falls on teachers, he says. “At my school, I’ve had parents tell me with relief as they drop off their children that it’s up to us to manage them for the day.”

Pelzer concludes: “It is increasingly clear that if we want more progressive disciplinary methods, we need one or both of two things: More in-school professional help, which can be costly, or better training.”

The International Institute for Restorative Practices addresses the training need through its degree, continuing education, and professional development offerings. There are no quick fixes, which makes the heroic perseverance of Pelzer and his colleagues all the more impressive.

District fights violence with conversation

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In Burien, Washington, elementary students begin their day with greetings, handshakes, eye contact, and polite questions. This activity is a cornerstone of the district’s impressive record of reducing discipline referrals—down 43% from 2014 to 2016—and suspensions and expulsions—down 70% in the same period.

But although the disciplinary overhaul at Highline Public Schools—a racially diverse district south of Seattle—has drawn praise, it has triggered criticism from teachers who worry that they weren’t trained adequately in alternative approaches to discipline. Teacher turnover has jumped, according to the Hechinger Report.

Some teachers say the changes happened too quickly and that classroom discipline has suffered. A high school special education teacher reported that students became more disrespectful after the threat of out-of-school suspensions diminished. And in-school suspensions rose dramatically as the number of students being sent home shrank.

Discipline is one of the most vexing issues for administrators. Schools often fail to initiate the teachers through formative practices, according to the Hechinger Report. At Highline, the district didn’t provide much guidance for how newly hired re-engagement specialists were expected to run their classrooms for students suspended in-school. Even where there is broad agreement among faculty and administration that a school or district needs a better formative culture, building that culture is slow and hard work.

This seems to be a challenge across urban, suburban, and rural contexts. In a chapter of The Content of their Character, a forthcoming publication from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, field researcher Richard Fournier observed: “Fragmentation also existed in the moral messaging between teachers and students, primarily as a result of the refusal or inability of school cultures to agree on deep, specific ethical and moral guidelines on serious social or academic issues that students encountered.”

At Highline, the district has committed to building a strong school culture.  The superintendent acknowledges missteps but is committed to staying the course—for the good of teachers and students.

Administrators who want to lead that sort of cultural change in a district or school are not without resources. The state of Illinois has published guidelines for implementing restorative justice in schools, and the International Institute for Restorative Practices offers graduate degrees, continuing education, and licensing opportunities.

New rules keep Illinois students in schools

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Limiting suspensions and expulsions is creating different outcomes for students in Illinois schools.

Legislation adopted by lawmakers in 2015 and implemented last year limits suspensions and expulsions for students in favor of “restorative practices” that promote dispute resolution, NPR Illinois reports.

The result has been a drastic decrease in suspensions, and a far different approach to discipline after years of zero-tolerance policies.

Springfield high school football player Isaiah Cooper explained how previous policies led to his expulsion for an innocent mistake. Cooper tossed a milk carton into a door jamb on his way out of the cafeteria one morning, only to find out the carton hit a girl in the head by accident.

“’He was just goofing off’—those were (the assistant principal’s) exact words,” said Cooper’s mother, Lindsay Chisam. “He ‘pulled back his arm and chucked it down the hallway’ is what she says, and she said he didn’t even stick around long enough to see if he’d hit anything.”

Cooper wrote the girl an apology, but her parents pressed charges and school police charged him with battery. He was eventually expelled for the remainder of his sophomore year, as well as his entire junior year.

NPR Illinois points out that the situation could have played out differently with new restorative practices in place.

“’Under new policies created by Senate Bill 100, exclusionary discipline of more than three days could be used only in cases where ‘the student’s continuing presence in school would either (i) pose a threat to the safety of other students, staff, or members of the community or (ii) substantially disrupt, impede, or interfere with the operation of the school,’ and after all other interventions have been exhausted,” according to the news site.

Statewide, suspensions decreased from 10,077 before the new law to 7,643 last year, many replaced with restorative conversations between students and administrators and parents designed to address the underlying issues involved in student conflicts.

“Sometimes, it’s a conversation and the student gets returned to class,” social worker Brielle Siskin told NPR. “However, often my goal is to bring the student and the teacher or the other student they had a conflict with together to have a conversation to really resolve the issue and talk about it so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Veteran Champaign teacher Jennifer White put it another way.

“The way we interact with students now, I almost think is a lot more like we interact with our own children,” she said. “You know, if my son does something disrespectful or that he needs some correction on, I’m going to take time to build our relationship and to teach him those things. And so we’re looking at responding to student behavior now, it is about the student as the entire person, and not just how they are academically in your class.”

The new approach plays into an observation University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter makes in his book The Death of Character, that “human beings are anything but automatons.

“We reflect, ponder, act in the world around us in ways that have consequences,” Hunter wrote.

Restorative practices are an effort to treat students less like automatons and more like human beings who must face the consequences of their actions and take responsibility for restoring relationships.

The Centre for Justice and Reconciliation offers other examples of how a different approach to student discipline has impacted other students, as well as resources for schools and educators looking to implement restorative practices.

Poverty, child abuse, and low achievement make forming character hard—but not impossible

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Sue-Ann Rosch, founder of the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, detailed the rampant school discipline problems that prompted a shift to a Restorative Justice approach during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in March.

“There was a frightening amount of suspensions during our 2014-15 school year, there were . . . 113 in total,” she said. “In addition, we started to see a trend of parents coming to the school to initiate fights in the school neighborhood if they felt their child had been wronged.”

EdWeek offers tips on how to implement restorative justice practices in schools.

New Orleans school looks to ‘restorative justice’ to slow ‘school-to-prison pipeline’

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A soft approach to school discipline at New Orleans’ Marrero Middle School is reducing suspensions and building relationships—a new dynamic after years of arresting and suspending students for bad behavior.

In 2015, Marrero Middle School drew national media attention when a Jefferson Parish 8th grader was arrested and handcuffed in front of his social studies class for throwing Skittles on the bus the day before.

According to The Atlantic:

The Skittles arrest drew national scrutiny. In response to the attention, the school district came up with a new discipline plan featuring restorative justice. The handbook now gives students the right to request a restorative circle before a suspension and offers schools guidance in how to use restorative techniques. The district also contracts with (New Orleans nonprofit Center for Restorative Approaches) to facilitate circles or train staff in restorative practices for any school that wants them.

In “restorative circles,” student caught fighting or breaking other rules or laws come together with a facilitator and parents to “repair the harm” through some sort of an agreement, a process Marrero principal Christina Conforto contends is more of a punishment than sending students home.

“Staying home for three days is an easy solution. That’s a vacation,” she said. “What is a harder solution is to sit there amongst your peers and their parents and your parents, and be made to take responsibility for what you did wrong. Being made to make amends, to have to make a contract, and have to apologize and shake hands in front of everybody? That is much more difficult than to stay home for three days.”

Since Marrero implemented the restorative justice approach in August 2016, suspensions at the school have declined by 56 percent, though Trout said the statistic is a side effect of the real goal of restorative justice.

“The goal of restorative practices is to create cultures and climates in which people feel connected to each other,” she said.

The process of building a stronger community at Marrero will undoubtedly benefit students and staff in ways they couldn’t predict.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and University of Virginia sociologist,  notes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America that “The components of morality are expressed in a community’s institutions, including its moral rules . . .”

“When it functions well, our moral culture binds us, compels us, in ways of which we are not fully aware,” he wrote.

Marrero is putting in the hard and slow work of establishing moral rules in its school climate and culture by requiring students to take responsibility for their actions. Not only does it reduce suspensions, and possibly incarcerations, but also establishes norms and practices of making amends students are unlikely to forget.

Restorative practices are difficult, and success requires sustained, committed work. The Centre for Justice and Reconciliation offers a six-part tutorial to better understand the model used at Marrero.

Moral discipline is a 21st-century skill

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CNN’s Fareed Zakaria thinks students in today’s world of information overload must develop “intellectual discipline” to say “no” to the lure of social media in order to “go deep” and “actually read books.”

Zakaria discussed his perspective as part of a panel on “Education in the Post-Truth World” during the 2017 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), which drew thousands of educators from more than 100 countries to Doha, Qatar, in November.

“I say this to my kids all the time, you can graze all these headlines and tweets and blog posts you like—at the end of the day the way you develop real knowledge about a subject still remains that you have to go deep; still remains that you have to actually read books; still remains that you have to talk to experts, travel to countries,” he said.

Zakaria compared the plethora of modern technologies to his experience growing up in India in the 1970s, when there was only one black and white television channel available that nobody watched.

The situation forced Zakaria to spend much of his time reading, and that led to a promising career. But today’s youth face a much different situation that will require them to learn how to tune out to focus in and sort fact from fiction.

“If I had a supercomputer in my pocket called an iPhone that could stream all the entertainment in the world, all the TV shows, I don’t think I would’ve read that much but I don’t think I would’ve had the career that I have,” he said. “I don’t know where that takes you.

“Children are going to have to learn something I didn’t have to learn as much which is discipline, intellectual discipline—the ability to say no,” Zakaria added.

“The world my children are growing up in is exactly the opposite, an explosion of choice, an explosion of options, an explosion of opportunity.”

Knowing how to say no and using “intellectual discipline” to “actually read books” is becoming increasingly important as many teens look to social media and other questionable sites to gather information.

Quartz points out that a 2016 Stanford University study shows the majority of students from middle school through the undergraduate level access news through social media sites like Twitter and Snapchat, and most can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s propaganda.

Zakaria’s comments also echo the same argument University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter applies to character education.

“Moral discipline, in many respects, is the capacity to say ‘no’; its function, to inhibit and constrain personal appetites on behalf of a greater good. This idea of a greater good points to a second element, moral attachment,” Hunter wrote in The Death of Character. “It reflects the affirmation of our commitments to a larger community, the embrace of an ideal that attracts us, draws us, animates us, inspires us.”

“Without strong moral attachment to the good, we won’t know when to say no.”

Educators looking to develop students’ moral attachment to the good and intellectual discipline to say no can find guidance at the The Jubilee Centre’s “Teaching Character Through Subjects” page.

The series was developed in England to “create an innovative resource for building character within 14 subjects across the school curriculum.”

Survey of Orthodox Jews: Sense of community getting stronger in Jewish schools

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A new survey of Modern Orthodox Jews in the United States provides interesting insights into the types of schools their children attend.

The research also highlights what Jewish parents think about the schools—institutions where the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture notes a renewed focus on citizenship and character education, especially on “Musar.”

The Nishma Research Profile of American Modern Orthodox Jews, released in late September, “involved a broad literature review, individual interviews, [and] survey development and testing by experienced researchers,” as well as “guidance by an advisory group comprised of people knowledgeable of the community, including rabbinic and lay leaders, sociologists, educators, and academics,” according to the report.

“This report presents findings based on responses from 3,903 individuals in the U.S. who identified themselves as ‘Modern Orthodox or Centrist Orthodox.’”

Questions touched on a wide variety of topics, from religious beliefs to women’s roles, to successes, opportunities, and challenges facing the Jewish community.

About 83 percent of respondents’ children in grades 1–12 attend an Orthodox Jewish day school, and about 75 percent of those are coeducational, rather than single gender, schools.

At the Orthodox Jewish day schools, “Jewish studies are seen as stronger than secular studies (70 percent fully agree that Jewish programs are strong vs. 61 percent for secular studies). Fewer agree that the schools do a good job of teaching middot (52 percent), tzniut (22 percent), or sex education (22 percent),” according to the report.

Parents of Jewish students segregated at schools by gender showed very similar results, though high schools were rated better for secular education, teaching critical thinking, and special education.

“Parents rate fully coed schools best overall, while single gender schools are rated best for Jewish studies and teaching tzniut,” Nishma Research reports.

Tzniut is the concept of modesty or privacy promoted by Orthodox Judaism, while middot refers to principles used to interpret biblical passages.

The Nishma report comes as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture prepares to release the book, The Content of Their Character, which will feature a chapter by Prof. Jack Werthheimer on how character and citizenship are formed in Jewish schools.

In recent decades, one movement influential among Jewish movements in America, including Reform communities, is “Musar,” or “moral discipline.” In an essay for The Hedgehog Review, Geoffrey Claussen, an associate professor of religious studies at Elon University and former president of the Society of Jewish Ethics, argued that one major Musar proponent emphasizes “the honesty, humility, patience, and discipline that doing Musar requires,” and also “advises daily practice—focusing one’s attention on a given character trait every morning, engaging in self-analysis by writing in one’s journal every evening, and dedicating time for study and good deeds on a daily basis.”

Another scholar “adds to this sort of regimen by emphasizing the moral significance of traditional Jewish observance, involvement with the life of a community, and friendships that offer critical feedback,” Claussen wrote.

The intentional character formation offered in many Jewish schools draws on deep religious sources and history, and serves as an example of the type of community-centered character-education approach.

Teaching students discipline, respect, and understanding through music

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HUMBLE, Texas – Park Lakes Elementary School teacher Stephanie Tiner is using music to teach students important qualities like discipline, respect, and understanding—lessons that can be a foundation for deeper conversations about good character.

Tiner secured a $3,700 grant from the Humble Independent School District Education Foundation this school year to purchase drums, bongos, maracas, and numerous other percussion instruments she plans to use to introduce students to “D.R.U.M.”

The acronym stands for Discipline, Respect, and Unity through Music, and it’s the title of a book authored by veteran Humble music teacher Jim Solomon about the power of music to bring people together, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Tiner told the news site that Park Lakes serves a large population of bilingual students, some with limited English, and her music class brings those students together with their traditional classmates.

Unlike schools that keep students segregated by their English abilities, Park Lakes blends the students in non-core classes to help them work together and learn about their racial differences and language barriers.

“I really wanted to try and figure out a way to use music to really tackle those issues that I kind of feel our country is even having a hard time with,” Tiner told the Chronicle. “Getting along with people who don’t look like you or sound like you through music is a wonderful way of doing that.”

Tiner said that although she just recently received the new instruments, they’ve helped to engage students in a collaborative effort to carry a rhythm and to learn to share the various drums, bongos, and lummi sticks on a rotating basis.

“It would help them to have to work together, to have to listen, to be disciplined, to treat each other with respect,” she said. “When you try to create music with people you are not listening to or that you don’t get along with, it’s noise, and I tell them all the time, ‘This isn’t noise class—this is music class.’”

And students have responded well to infusing lessons on character with the music.

“Having a more character education driven classroom in general around this has made a big difference,” Tiner said. “They are constantly trying to work together to earn points to move onto the next step.”

Tiner’s music-driven character lessons are an excellent way to engaging students in more in-depth conversations about the virtues of good character.

The experience of cultivating habits of respect, attentiveness, and humility in schools through music and other subjects should lead to deeper conversations about why we should show respect and listen attentively when it’s easier to insist on our own perspective and disregard others’ opinions and feelings. Incorporating character virtues into music classes (example here) will make the character lessons explicit.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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