How Educators Can *Actually* Be Nice at School

PART I of II

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I am the principal of a private, secular, K-8 school. Every year that I have been principal, the behaviors start out fine in the fall, and slowly deteriorate after that, no matter how hard we work at it. They are particularly bad in our middle school. Some of our programming involves having class meetings when students cause major problems and figuring out what the student should do to make amends. As the behaviors get worse and worse, we have to talk more and more about behavior. This is an especially bad dynamic since our parents have extremely high expectations (as they should) for their children’s academic success, and we have less and less time to teach. As the school leader, what can I do to improve the behavior at my school?

There’s probably nothing that you can do.

I realize that this is bad and unhelpful news, and I’m truly sorry about that.

The sad reality is that your school has chosen to do some things that are really hurtful, and so against common sense, that it is very unlikely that the elements that make up your school culture (including the parents of your students) would support doing things that would be the opposite of what you are doing. More on that in a moment.

What you are doing sounds cute and nice to parents, and it’s making the behavior worse and destroying your school.

As you know as well as anyone, unless they are educators, parents of students want to hear that you are “doing discipline” in a way that sounds nice. The problem is that non-educator parents are amateurs and, when it comes to school discipline, they have no idea what they are talking about. Unfortunately, as you are painfully aware, this doesn’t stop them from talking about it. To you. For a long time.

And at your private school, they’re paying the bills. So, you have a choice of whether you are going to allow the amateurs to run your school.

Unfortunately, at schools like yours, administrators usually don’t have the political clout to make the hard decisions to turn away from nice-sounding, ineffective so-called “behavior management” programs, even when they are 100% sure that the application of those programs are making behaviors worse and harming kids.

The other reason is that they rarely have an effective alternative to these approaches.

The irony is that their efforts to sound gentle and kind (Let’s all get together and talk about how things make us feel”) fail because they do the same things wrong that most traditional, punishment-based programs do: they do not systematically focus on relationship-building, prevention, systematic choice giving, the systematic giving of attention and control to positive behaviors, and the teaching of positive behaviors that mirrors exactly how teachers teach their academic subjects.

Certain tactics, such as holding a whole-group meeting immediately after a negative behavior, can sound nice. I suggest a comprehensive means of actually being nice.

Because Traditional Discipline does not focus enough on the elements I described above (90% of all efforts to elicit positive behaviors from students should either be preventive or mitigative), educators end up spending way too much time responding to negative behaviors, and many teachers respond in ways that are, let’s just say, not too cute, gentle or kind. Its Traditional Discipline dressed up to look nice.

So that’s where you are, and unfortunately It’s doubtful that your culture will allow you to change to do what we guide people to do: a whole school transformation whereby you systematically give kids using positive behaviors attention and control all day long, while constantly making negative behaviors (behaviors that cause problems) non-functional by having your educators trained to prevent, mitigate, and properly respond to negative behaviors with love, empathy, and by teaching positive behaviors.

In our next installment, I’ll show you an example of how your teachers can get all of the benefits that you are trying unsuccessfully to get from these meetings (the behavior stopping and the creation of a just, kind, safe learning environment) without any of the inevitable negatives of having a public kumbaya session (the worst behaved kids get showered with attention and control, we lose instructional time and the behaviors get worse).