Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for June 29, 2008 PUNISHMENT VERSUS DISCIPLINE

Talk about "Pie in the sky!"

Please come to Cairo, Julia...I'd pay the price of admission to watch you conduct a typical Junior/Senior High School class with your "Come, Let Us Reason Together" philosophy of "discipline".

Eager to see two things...

• What mischief the other 20 students in the class engage in while you are "reasoning" with one, and
• How long it takes you to get "emotional" and go "Jurassic Park" on some sweet, unreasonable student!

Julia Steiny says schools can’t punish a kid into cooperation

No one likes an unruly, mouthy or disruptive brat. But the adult urge to fight unwanted behavior by shaming, temporarily banishing or otherwise hurting the kid into compliance has begun to seem not just ineffective to me, but full-on Jurassic.

“Zero tolerance?” Does that even sound like a good idea, when you think about it?

So I asked psychologists Margaret Paccione-Dyszlewski and Steve Barreto to help me better understand the psychology of punishment. I was surprised when our meeting began with their insistence on first defining terms. To them, “discipline” and “punishment” are two very different animals.

Dr. Paccione-Dyszlewski is the director of the department of behavioral education and Dr. Barreto is a senior psychologist at the in-patient program at Bradley Hospital. Both are also clinical assistant professors at Brown Medical School. Bradley was the nation’s first children’s mental-health hospital.

Dictionaries often define discipline as punishment and vice versa. But the psychologists distinguish between the two by looking at the presence of emotion and how it’s handled.

“Punishment” is meted out in the heat of the moment, by a person having a visceral reaction. Or it is a hurtful consequence of violating rules intended to control the heat of emotional reactions. Those thick student handbooks that students take home, but never look at, establish the school’s authority and right to punish. Barreto says, “At a school, when the adults or institution are challenged, that can be emotional.”

When a kid is rude or insulting, teachers’ feelings naturally get hurt. The thick book of rules handles the teacher’s emotions by imposing punishment, hoping to create a negative Pavlovian response in the kid, so the mouthy punk won’t do it again. These rules are considered fair because they apply to all kids — not to the grownups, of course — without regard to circumstance or individuals.

The “suspensions” pages for each Rhode Island school on the Information Works Web site show that “insubordination/disrespect” and “disorderly conduct” are leading reasons to kick a kid out of school for a few days. That’s punishment.

“Discipline,” on the other hand, involves a community collaborating on a set of rules that define who we are as a community — be it a family or a school. The point of the rule system is to help us hold together as a community. Barreto says, “Authority comes in relationship to community. We agree we both have a responsibility to the community.” Discipline includes the child in the community by reengaging her, in what the psychologists call a “relational model.” Punishment excludes.

Paccione-Dyszlewski gives this example, “If Steve is the student, and he runs out of math class, the teacher says, ‘That’s bad; you need to go to the vice principal.’

In a relational model, the teacher says, ‘Steve, help me understand why you’re running out?’ If Steve feels safe and believes I care about him, Steve’s going to tell me. He’s likely to say, ‘I don’t understand the math. I want to go to the bathroom. I can’t sit still that long.’ So what do I [the teacher] need? I need Steve to sit through my math class. So we’ve told each other what we need. I’m sharing my authority with Steve. That’s discipline, relationship building. I might then say, ‘So go to the bathroom. Or walk to the library and then come back. Then do the last five problems.’ ”

Barreto adds, speaking as the teacher, “And tomorrow, put something on your desk so I know what you need. But don’t leave the room. I need you to cooperate; the community needs it. This is a collaboration.”

Paccione-Dyszlewski completes the thought, “Every child needs to learn how to negotiate so he can be a member of a community. This is partly my job as a teacher.”

Because these days, it is all too easy for youths to feel excluded from the community, whether it’s an overburdened or neglectful family, a tough “hood,” or an uncaring school.

Discipline in a collaborative or relational model is about meeting three needs — the adult’s and the child’s needs, of course, but also the community’s need for the adult to retain authority.

Paccione-Dyszlewski says, “When the school system [teachers or administration] come to the table to solve problems with the child, they can feel as though they lose authority. In fact, you gain authority by giving it away. The mere fact that I’m sitting with the child shows I’m choosing to be respectful, choosing to be collaborative. And that respect is going to come back to me 1,000-fold. It enhances my authority.”

She continues, “Schools can be communities, but too often they exclude parents and exclude kids. A lack of community results in punishing behaviors, because breaking the rules assaults the school’s authority.”

And then schools end up in a bad cycle of punishing kids, some of whom retaliate by acting out again, and on it goes.

But as the Bradley psychologists show, finding out what’s really going on with a kid, while expressing grownup needs as well, will get to the root of the problem and be much more likely to nip antisocial behavior in the bud.

In short, punishment doesn’t work. Schools should give it up.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.