Three Ways to Handle Discipline               In this thoughtful article in Educational Researcher, researchers David Ocher, George Bear, Jeffrey Sprague, and Walter Doyle describe three approaches to reducing disruptive and antisocial student behavior:               • Ecological – This approach focuses on effective classroom teaching as the best way to prevent misbehavior from occurring in the first place. A school day can be seen as a series of 10- to 20-minute segments, each with a characteristic “vector” involving the content being taught, what the teacher does, resources and props, and students’ roles. The teacher’s core management task, according to the ecological approach, is creating direction, momentum, and energy in each segment so that students are engaged and misbehavior is infrequent and minor and can be nipped in the bud with a “Shah” or a look.   Creating this kind of classroom environment is not easy. “Teachers accomplish this,” say the authors, “by defining activity segments, introducing them into the environment, inviting and socializing students to participate, and monitoring and adjusting enactment over time. This task is collaborative: the teacher and students jointly construct classroom order. The difficulty of the task is related to the complexity of the activities a teacher is trying to enact, the number of students in a class, time constraints, the demands of the work assigned to students, the activity and willingness of students to engage in these activities, the social and emotional capacities of students, the quality of the relationship between and among teachers and students, and seasonal variations and distractions.”   Although there is little research on the ecological approach, the authors say that it’s logical that well-managed classrooms in which students are engaged in learning contribute to a school’s overall climate. “If classroom activities lack holding power,” they say, “it is unlikely that school wide discipline will make up for this deficiency. At the same time, for the ecological approach to be effective, students must come to school ready to attend and to be engaged. This is rarely possible in chaotic, unsafe, or alienating schools, or when students struggle with barriers to learning.”               • School wide positive behavioral supports – The second approach emphasizes developing systems to prevent misbehavior and manage student behavior by communicating and teaching rules and rewarding student compliance. The theory, say the authors, is that when adults in the school “actively teach, using modeling and role playing, and reward positive behaviors related to compliance with adult requests, academic effort, and safe behavior, the proportion of students with mild and serious behavior problems will be reduced and the school’s overall climate will improve.”   This approach uses three tiers: school wide rules and interventions (with a clear delineation of what classroom teachers should handle versus what the office should handle); selective interventions for students who have difficulty following rules; and focused actions for the most chronically and intensely at-risk students. There are also faculty discussions of patterns of misbehavior and how to use data to improve climate and discipline.   Research says the school wide positive behavior supports approach prevents many discipline problems if it includes:   ·         A small number of positively stated rules and expectations; ·         Teaching appropriate social behavior; ·         Monitoring compliance with rules and expectations; ·         Consistently enforcing rule violations with mild negative consequences; ·         Providing a rich schedule of positive reinforcement for appropriate social behavior; ·         Supplementing all this with classroom interventions and individualized support for students with the most serious challenges.   With these components, school wide positive behavior supports can result in up to a 50 percent reduction in discipline referrals over a three-year period.               • Social-emotional learning – The third approach emphasizes developing students’ self-discipline by teaching self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, deemphasizing rewards and punishments in favor of supportive teacher-student relationships and student responsibility. Some schools use packaged programs, others integrate content throughout the existing curriculum, and there are often home-school and service-learning components.               Studies have found specific social-emotional programs to be effective, including PATHS (Providing Alternative Thinking Strategies), Second Step, Steps to Respect, the Seattle Social Development Program, and Caring School Communities (formerly the Child Development Project).               The authors conclude that each of these approaches has strong and weak points and the best bet is to combine all three, striving to include these key characteristics:   ·         Promoting shared values on the mission, purpose, and traditions of the school; ·         Establishing the four conditions for learning: emotional and physical safety, connectedness, authentic challenges, and a responsible peer climate; ·         Facilitating these with four types of student support: positive behavioral support, supportive relationships, engaging and supportive teaching, and social-emotional learning (promoting prosaically behavior); ·         Providing a caring, nurturing climate with collegial relationships among adults and students; ·         Aligning all these components throughout the school; ·         Collaborating with families; ·         Building cultural and linguistic competence and responsiveness; ·         Responding to the needs of students with substantive mental-health needs.   David Ocher, et.al., “How Can We Improve School Discipline?”, Educational Researcher, January/February 2010 (Vol. 39, #1, p. 48-58), no e-link available; Ocher can be reached at dosher@air.org.