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By Dr. Harry Tennant
Monday, September 17, 2012 Education Ride 365: From Mere Inconvenience & Discomfort To Opportunity When students are sent to the school office for a discipline issue it is common practice to have them "write a statement" detailing their side of the story. The resulting document is often amazingly frank and telling. In my capacity as a school administrator---as the adult reading these---I more often than not gained valuable insight into the young person. Beyond seeing their take on the facts of the particular incident, they often expounded in a way that provided me an opportunity to begin understanding their feelings and perspectives at the root of the issue. They would often share context that helped me understand their situation more deeply, so I could better address their behavior as that of an individual person rather than yet another discipline case. This was not always the result. These statement forms tend to be open-ended. While there are advantages to the form being open-ended, I often wondered how much more consistently valuable the exercise could have been were it more directed. I began to think of this opportunity as a way to address some more mundane, yet very real, challenges the school discipline process presents. Traditional discipline settings such as detentions are primarily designed to inconvenience or discomfort a child into compliance, but quite often produce just as much inconvenience and discomfort for the adults involved. How could I lessen the burden of traditional discipline consequences by capitalizing on the benefits of directed student written reflection towards the end of a more progressive discipline process? Read how in my next blog post! Posted at 2:43 PM Keywords: Education Ride 365 , EdClick , Cycle Of Education , Discipline 0 Comments |