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As schools continue to transition from pandemic-induced disruption to a new normal, educators must realize that the most vulnerable students are the ones who've been harmed the most. The problem is, because trauma and mental health distress aren't immediately visible, educators won't know "which" students are in a quiet state of psychological desperation. Therefore, it is best to respond to all acting-out behaviors with expressions of support that leave the door open to identifying any underlying issues. If the underlying cause of students' disruptive behaviors is mental health distress, punitive and exclusionary discipline will worsen both their mental health and their acting-out behaviors. Students need to feel safe. They're most likely to feel safe when they know they won't be shamed in front of peers if they make poor behavioral choices. Relational discipline is grounded in research showing that leveraging positive educator-student relationships is more effective than punishment in motivating students to adhere to classroom expectations (Marzano, Marzano, & Pickering, 2003). By using relational discipline and making instruction more engaging, educators can ensure that all students--especially those still feeling the effects of trauma--have a successful return to school and learning.

Educators must be especially conscious of using compassionate discipline with students living in poverty. Imagine the stresses felt while growing up poor--insecurity about the basics, living in unsafe conditions, perhaps having untreated health conditions or a parent in jail. Research shows that living in poverty can produce changes in the human brain--from decision making to empathy. As an educational consultant who helps schools apply neuroscience findings, the author shares why it is crucial that teachers understand how poverty can affect the brain. Caring teachers can help reduce or reverse the harmful neurological effects of poverty. This article discusses three ways to strengthen low-income students' natural capacity for self-control, social behavior, and empathy: (1) Forge a positive social climate; (2) Teach social skills; and (3) Increase empathy.

The George Floyd incident caused severe anxiety in a lot of people, especially children and adults of color. These types of tragic incidents tend to happen to Black and Brown people more often than any other group. Experiencing or witnessing violent events like this can lead to trauma--and teachers must realize that the events of last year may have caused trauma in many of their students. Black students--especially males--were more likely to be suspended than white students. Black male students represented 8 percent of enrolled students but accounted for 25 percent of students who received an out-of-school suspension. In all, 1.2 million Black and Latino males were suspended from K-12 schools in this country in the 2011-2012 academic year (Smith & Harper, 2015). Educator and author Pedro Noguera (2008) notes that Black males are often seen as being generally threatening, disruptive, uncooperative, and defiant, while their white male counterparts are more likely to be seen as engaging in specific discipline issues or violations, like smoking or fighting--not as "trouble" overall. To be a culturally competent educator means more than embracing students' diversity. It means having a system of discipline built on healthy relationships, trust, respect, empathy, and accountability--not on harsh punishment. This not only creates a positive school culture; it helps students perform at higher levels--which increases internal stability and elevates the institution.

When students misbehave, understanding the problem behind their actions can make all the difference in the effectiveness of teacher response. Teachers and students sometimes view the same behaviors differently. When students break school rules, teachers consider the behavior a problem. But for the student, that behavior is often a solution to some other problem. This article discusses: (1) responses to misbehavior; (2) compassionate responding; (3) compassion as a choice; (4) new ways to look at misbehavior; and (5) self-compassionate discipline.

To fully support students, schools must attend to the trauma that occurs within their own institutional cultures. Equity advocate Paul Gorski describes three transformative commitments schools can make to maximize the potential of trauma-informed education.

In these unprecedented times, educators need to infuse equity and justice into their discipline practices. Whether operating in-person or remotely, the schools that succeed this year will be the ones that put mental health at the center of all policies and practices, says Micere Keels, director of the Trauma Responsive Educational Practices Project at the University of Chicago.

Jackson--a former teacher, now a speaker and author--shares techniques he used as a new high school teacher to handle disruptive behaviors and threatening conduct from students, while remaining respectful and compassionate about the realities kids faced. His suggestions: establish rules early on and stick to them unwaveringly; understand your students' challenging life realities (especially students of color who face racism in school); communicate carefully and regularly affirm students; and learn how to control your emotions so students have a model of emotional strength to learn from.

Charts that keep (public) track of whether a student's behavior is in some equivalent of a red (problem), yellow, or green ("well-behaved") zone are ubiquitous in elementary schools. This strategy based on shaming students is due to be retired because (1) it promotes only compliance, not social-emotional learning; (2) charts don't teach self-regulation; and (3) shaming harms students. The authors suggest alternative, relationship-based strategies for dealing with behavior that thwarts learning.

Teachers struggle with using consequences for misbehavior--because using consequences well requires a nuanced view of disciplinary situations. Anderson explores six factors that complicate the use of consequence: Confusion over what consequences means; confusion over what it means for a punishment to "work;" the fact that teachers' disciplinary choices feel private yet impact others; the tendency to be either too permissive or too harsh; the tendency to act out of emotion; and a misperception of the role of consequences in an overall strategy. He suggests ways to overcome these common obstacles.

"Having spent my career as a teacher in urban schools with large majorities of black and brown students, I've witnessed the school-to-prison pipeline at work too many times to deny it," writes James E. Ford. In this article, he draws from research and from his personal experience as a teacher to examine the root causes of high suspension and punishment rates for students of color. Some people, he points out, assume that students of color are disproportionately represented in the discipline data because they simply commit more offenses. This assumption is false; black and brown students are more likely than white students to be sent to the office or suspended for the same misbehaviors. Ford suggests instead that a major root of discipline disparities is implicit racial bias--unconscious attitudes about groups of people that influence our decision making. Even the most well-meaning educators come into the classroom with unconscious biases, and recognizing and challenging those biases is the first step to ending racial discipline inequity.

Statistics show that black girls in U.S. K-12 public schools are overrepresented among students who face disciplinary approaches (such as suspensions) that exclude or even criminalize them. Morris explains how black girls face conditions that make them vulnerable to a phenomenon she calls "school to confinement pathways"--conditions like race- and gender-based oppression, sexual victimization, and even biases (often implicit) among educators that affect how these girls are disciplined. Yet educators often dismiss girls' responses to being victimized as combative behaviors rather than as symptoms of trauma. Morris recommends three ways educators can respond to black girls more equitably: creating "healing-informed learning spaces" that involve nonpunitive discipline; using diverse, unbiased curriculums; and providing guidance about college and career pathways.

Teacher John Hayward believes no classroom can advance far academically unless the teacher has first guided the class to become a community. With a focus on the first days and weeks of school, the author shares strategies any teacher can use to help everyone in the room learn about one another and to show students that he or she will be a transparent and trustworthy instructor. Hayward suggests alternatives to publically correcting students whose behavior disrupts and ways to carefully observe students as they learn--to lay a foundation for both knowing them well and for helping them.

Schools can view challenging student behavior in one of two ways: (1) as a failure on the part of the student or teacher that distracts from the work of learning, or (2) as a normal developmental occurrence that provides an opportunity for the student to practice new or emerging skills. The authors of this article, researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, assert that research on the importance of strong teacher-student relationships supports the latter approach. The authors describe strategies to prevent discipline issues while promoting relationships and building key skills (for example, "Cool Kid," "Class Council," and "Peace Path"), which they developed and collected under the acronym SECURe (Social, Emotional and Cognitive Understanding and Regulation in Education). Pilot studies have shown that the SECURe approach improves classroom climates and improve students' social and emotional well-being.

Growing up in a poor, dysfunctional family in a violent inner-city neighborhood, Jackson faced daily challenges even getting to the bus stop without being attacked by gang members. When he was bused to a white suburban school in 5th grade, things got even worse. Every black student who was bused in from his neighborhood was placed in remedial classes, where they had to test their way out. Teachers made little effort to get to know these students or to understand their circumstances. Not only students and parents but also teachers often made sarcastic and racist remarks. Jackson became a success in spite of the lack of support he received from teachers, but he understands why many low-income black and Latino males don't. In this article, he draws on his experiences as a student and teacher to recommend some basic principles for educators who want to build strong relationships with these students, including active listening, fairness and consistency, transparency, and appropriate discipline.

Imposing a penalty for late or incomplete homework assignments, Dueck says, neither inspires learning nor provides accurate grades. Dueck lists four rules that a teacher must follow if penalties for inadequate homework are to be efficient in prodding students to do that work. The usual homework penalty structures violate each of these four rules. Nor is punitive grading helpful in instilling a work ethic among students, as many teachers wish. Dueck, a high school history teacher, discusses alternative practices to punitively grading homework: tying in-class quizzes to specific practice homework (started in class); using a grade of "incomplete" and interventions to support students until they finish; and using projects tied to student interests.

In this article, the author discusses what school leaders can do to support teachers in building stronger relationships with students. He points out that efforts at establishing positive relationships can--and must--be strengthened at the schoolwide level. School leaders who are shifting from an emphasis on discipline to one on relationships must examine their vision, actions, and assumptions about students. Teachers and school leaders cannot merely advocate for better relationships or an improved climate; they must use proven strategies that set students up for success. Action items should serve as support layers for building effective relationships that maximize student learning (Sterrett, 2011). The following are some of the actions the author has seen schools take to cultivate a better climate: (1) Promote a positive vision; (2) Create classroom communities; (3) Provide extra support; (4) Build consistent relationships; and (5) Recognize success.

It's a challenge for schools in every country: How to provide the right kind of discipline and create a climate that nurtures learning. This challenge may look different in different countries. A school's disciplinary climate not only is the product of educators' beliefs and actions, students' beliefs and actions, and the interaction of these, but also is shaped by the legal and social context of the country. Yet when they became involved in researching questions of school discipline and the moral authority of teachers, the authors were surprised at the dearth of research comparing various countries' ideas about discipline and typical responses to challenging behaviors. They recently brought together an international group of 18 social scientists to study the relationship between school discipline and student achievement. Their study examined assessment and survey data from 49 countries that participated in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS), with in-depth case studies of Canada, Chile, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. The authors compared these countries in terms of how extensive their schools' discipline challenges are, the national context and organizational structure of their schools, and the way discipline is typically administered in schools. The study also examined the relationship between the level of school discipline problems and the level of student achievement--and found a definite correlation between the two. In this article, the authors explore some of what these case studies reveal and reflect on lessons for U.S. educators. (Contains 1 endnote.)

Schools' use of zero tolerance policies has been increasing since the 1980s as part of a societal movement to crack down on drug abuse and violence among youth. But far from making schools safer, this harsh, inflexible approach to discipline has been eroding the culture of schools and creating devastating consequences for children, writes Browne-Dianis. In this article, she presents statistics about the increase in school suspensions and student arrests and describes individual cases that demonstrate the senselessness of harsh discipline practices. She also describes school districts that have revised their discipline codes, developing alternatives to zero tolerance in the form of positive support and interventions.

The win-win approach to solving conflicts, which has become popular in the business world, should be a natural for the school environment. Win-win thinking can foster a cooperative school climate by meeting educators' and students' needs for dignity, belonging, and respect. Yet win-win thinking faces a number of obstacles in schools, writes Bluestein--including teachers' fear of relinquishing control over classroom discipline, the misconception that providing academic safety means babying students, and schools' tendency to focus on the negative. Bluestein describes simple and unobtrusive shifts that teachers can implement in their classrooms to create a more positive climate in which power struggles are replaced by cooperation and mutual respect. (Contains 1 endnote.)

In an age when students gravitate to online sources for research--and when tremendous amounts of both reputable and questionable information are available online--many have come to regard the Internet itself as a culprit in students' plagiarism. Some teachers go so far as to forbid students from researching online, in the mistaken assumption that if students are working from hard-copy sources only, the problem will disappear. The authors believe that an approach far different from either warnings and punishment or attempts to curtail online research is warranted. Teachers who wish to prevent plagiarism should devote extensive instruction to the component tasks of writing from sources. In this article, the authors offer several strategies on how teachers can discourage plagiarism among their students.

For long-term learning and positive connections to take place in the classroom, we need to assume that our students want to learn both content and appropriate behavior in school. Teachers must explicitly teach behavior, pausing in their lessons to address misbehavior in the classroom. Five strategies can help: using volume, tone, and posture to communicate in a firm but nonthreatening way; implementing the Two-by-Ten Strategy (use two minutes each day for ten days in a row to get to know a troublesome student); breaking things into steps; using behavior rubrics; and using visuals. (Contains 1 endnote.)

To raise the literacy achievement of secondary school students, some schools train their whole faculties in general reading and writing strategies to implement across the curriculum. Content-area teachers often resist this approach, however, fearing that setting aside time for literacy instruction will dilute the academic rigor of mathematics, science, and social studies courses. An alternative approach called disciplinary literacy builds students' academic content knowledge and their reading, writing, and thinking skills simultaneously. Disciplinary literacy is based on the premise that students develop deep conceptual knowledge in a discipline by using the habits of reading, writing, talking, and thinking which that discipline values and uses. This article gives detailed classroom examples of how teachers implement the five principles of the disciplinary literacy framework: knowledge and thinking go hand in hand; learning is apprenticeship; teachers mentor student apprentices; instruction and assessment drive each other; and classroom culture socializes intelligence.

Discusses six traditional instructional assumptions and practices that impede the creation of a caring classroom environment: blaming the students, keeping control of the classroom, missing the systemic factors, ignoring problems with the curriculum, settling for self-discipline, and manipulating with "positive reinforcement." (Contains 12 references.) (PKP)

Evaluation of a Wisconsin initiative compared academic progress in three types of smaller K-3 classes (15 students per teacher) with that in comparison schools. Smaller classes had fewer discipline problems, more time for instruction and individualization, varied instructional strategies, and more content and in-depth coverage. (Contains 10 references.) (MLH)

A Virginia Department of Education survey of urban, suburban, and rural schools using block scheduling revealed fewer disciplinary problems, a strong teacher preference for this format over traditional scheduling, and positive effects on standardized test scores in reading and mathematics. When time is used well in schools, school climate improves and learning opportunities increase. (MLH)

A large Baltimore high school has shown how personalizing relationships and focusing the curriculum can turn around an unsafe school and create a climate conducive to learning. The school adopted the Talent Development model, which created six smaller units or academies. Instead of suspending or transferring ill-behaved students, Patterson established an alternative, afterhours Twilight School to help them resolve their problems. (MLH)

Although traditional discipline procedures (expulsion, time-out rooms, suspensions, and scolding) teach students to depend on authority figures to resolve conflicts, the Peacemaker Program teaches children how to mediate disputes and negotiate solutions themselves. To regulate their own behavior, students must have opportunities to make decisions regarding how to behave and follow through on the decisions made. (MLH)

Madison Elementary School, a K-6 school of 335 students in Marshfield, Wisconsin, recognizes the value of student feedback and strives to learn more through monthly student meetings, whole-class sit-downs, and student exit interviews. As the principal of Madison Elementary School, the author meets with a group of students for half an hour during lunch on the first Friday of each month to talk about ways Madison can improve. They call these sessions ROARS (Representing Outstanding and Responsible Students) meetings to coincide with the school's tiger mascot. To give lots of students a chance to participate, each classroom sends two different representatives to ROARS each month; these students are chosen by the teacher or voted on by the class. They share minutes from these meetings with the parent-teacher organization, the student body, and staff. Student comments at the meetings have led to changes in lunchroom rules and procedures, student discipline policies, and pedagogical practices. The author and the school guidance counselor also visit classrooms regularly to talk with students about such topics as bullying, test preparation, school rules, recess guidelines, and school safety. These discussions, which usually last 20-30 minutes, are called sit-downs to emphasize that the role of the principal and counselor is to sit down and listen. At the end of the school year, the author conducts one-on-one exit interviews in his office with graduating 6th grade students. Exit interviews have given them a wealth of ideas on how best to serve their students. When it comes to school improvement, students have a great deal to offer. Principals, teachers, and staff would be unwise to ignore this source of knowledge, insight, and talent that fills the school building every day. Knowing how, when, and what to ask and offer students can mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful school.

Describes what students perceive as caring. Reports results of 6-month observation of how 6 teachers' use of power in the treatment of their students. Finds that when teachers disciplined their students with respect they communicated genuine caring for their students, which students reciprocated with respect for the teachers. (PKP)

Describes the need for a discipline policy that applies equally to students with disabilities and those without. Should include preventive discipline, supportive discipline, and corrective discipline. Provides examples of each. (PKP)

School buildings ideally would have few exterior access points, no isolated hallways, and sunlit classrooms. A safety checklist recommends locating offices near main doors, monitoring hallway traffic, enhancing communications, updating crisis-management plans, teaching coping skills, standardizing dismissal policies, and ensuring legal compliance and community involvement. (MLH)

Frustrated by her ninth graders' misbehavior with a substitute teacher, a high school English teacher shelved her recriminations and engaged miscreants in a problem-solving exercise examining the incident. Establishing a protocol to talk about problems openly, without fear of retribution, made a big difference. Boys admitted to some poor choices; a few voluntarily gave up food privileges for throwing pumpkin seeds. (MLH)

When a Connecticut school's assertive-discipline plan failed to generate a sense of ownership and community, faculty replaced rewards with schoolwide celebrations and consequences with problem solving. When students misbehave, teachers encourage them to reflect on their behavior, consider its effect on others, and devise appropriate restitution. A student spirit committee, classroom buddies, school-community breakfasts, and biweekly school assemblies help build community. (MLH)

Presents data from a survey of the effectiveness of middle school programs in 34 states. The data show that changing to middle school organization results in student achievement gains, decreased discipline problems, enhanced personal development among students, and other positive effects. (MD)

Academically successful schools need to master student discipline and accept that character development is as important as academic development. Provides recommendations on how schools can do both. (MD)

Outlines the program of Bethany Baptist Academy, a fundamentalist religious K-12 school in the Midwest. The school socializes the students to think and behave according to the dictates of its religious doctrine. (MD)

This interview explores William Glasser's ideas about educational relevancy and students' needs for belonging, power (feeling important), freedom, and fun. Glasser advocates learning teams and control theory to help students determine their needs and explore alternative choices for satisfying them. Schools cannot succeed at teaching the basics without attending to student needs. Includes two references. (MLH)

Discusses the three counterforces that work against teaching art in the schools: (1)students' naive concepts; (2) schooling's neglect of intelligent behavior; and (3) counterproductive disciplinary procedures. Presents the concept of "invisible art" used to teach an experimental course in art appreciation. Includes extensive references. (MD)

The effectiveness claims for Assertive Discipline made by Lee Canter and other advocates are not supported by the limited research that has been conducted in the program's 12 years of existence. (Author/TE)