—William Glasser, Control Theory in the Classroom
What Are We Asking?
Pick a book on discipline from your shelf and take a few minutes to leaf through it. Or, if you prefer, watch one of the countless videos on the subject that are now available, or sit in on a workshop. One way or another, you'll be treated to a bushel of suggestions for how to get students to behave however you want them to—or for how to get them to act “appropriately,” which often amounts to the same thing. What you almost certainly will not find in any discipline program, however, is an invitation to reflect on what it is you want and whether it's reasonable.
People who market discipline programs know that it is deeply unsettling for educators to have to reconsider their requests and demands, their expectations and rules. It is far more convenient to take these things for granted, to treat them collectively as our point of departure so that we can concentrate on getting compliance. We prefer to avoid questions about the ends and instead focus on the means—which is to say, on techniques. Thus, the problem always rests with the child who doesn't do what he is asked, never with what he has been asked to do.
Some writers and consultants ensure this rather comfortable arrangement by offering theories to account for children's misbehavior that permanently locate the source of the problem—any problem—inside the student. For example, Rudolf Dreikurs insists that misbehavior can be explained by appealing to a fixed set of goals that he attributes to children, but that the children themselves are never aware of. These goals are: a quest for attention, power, revenge, and a desire to “display inadequacy” (or “use disability as an excuse”) (Dreikurs 1968, pp. 27–32; Dreikurs and Grey 1968, pp. 36–40; Dreikurs et al. 1982, pp. 14–16). I've already suggested that these characteristics reflect a rather dark view of children. More than that, though, their effect is to circumvent anything like an open-minded attempt to make sense of what is going on in a classroom. Such an exploration would require us to entertain the possibility that it may be the teacher's request, rather than the child's unwillingness to comply with it, that needs to be addressed.
When one student punches another, of course, there isn't much controversy: almost all of us would agree that aggression should be condemned and stopped. But in more general terms, the crux of the matter may be who decides, and by what criteria, that a child's behavior
is “misbehavior” in the first place. That inconvenient question, in turn, raises some others: Is a silent classroom really more conducive to learning than one where children are talking—or is it simply less trouble for the teacher? Is it reasonable to expect children to sit still for extended periods of time? Is it necessary for them to raise their hands before speaking, to keep their eyes on the teacher, to line up before leaving the classroom?
To anyone familiar with programs like Assertive Discipline, it will come as no surprise that such questions are never raised. Indeed, teachers are explicitly discouraged from reflecting on the wisdom of anything they are doing since this only produces “guilt, anxiety, and frustration” rather than “lead[ing] to confident behavior management” (Canter and Canter 1992, p. 9). The assertive teacher “tells students exactly what behavior is acceptable. . . . No questions. No room for confusion” (p. 27). This matter-of-fact demand for mindless obedience follows quite naturally from the premise that all problems are the students' fault. They are the ones who “talk when asked to be quiet; who dawdle when asked to work; who argue and talk back when asked to follow directions” (p. 6).
The creators of a rival program called Discipline with Dignity rightly observe that Assertive Discipline “sees students as the cause of all problems, so there are no demands on anybody else in the system to change” (Curwin and Mendler 1989, p. 83). But this criticism could well be leveled against their own approach. We are advised that the “effective” teacher in Discipline with Dignity might announce to a child, “Mary, we*
raise our hands before speaking,” followed ominously by “This is your reminder” (Curwin and Mendler 1988, p. 72). (In Assertive Discipline, the preferred word in the follow-up sentence is “warning”; otherwise, the two tactics are identical.) The rule in a 1st grade classroom, meanwhile, is that during story time, “Legs will be crossed, arms folded, and there will be no moving around once you sit” (p. 61). In neither of these examples do the authors consider that the rule itself might be problematic; rather, the rule is accepted without question and the task at hand is to impose a consequence on a student who persists in failing to obey.
It's much the same in a program called 21st Century Discipline (Bluestein 1988, p. 71), where teachers are essentially given a blank check: what matters, the reader is told, is
what YOU want. Do you require a certain heading on the papers they turn in? Do you want them to push in their chairs before they leave the room? Will it drive you crazy if someone starts to sharpen a pencil while you are addressing the group? Where do you want the counters kept when the students are finished with them?
Once again, there is not a whisper of inquiry into whether these are reasonable demands, or how it must feel to be a student in a place where one's own preferences don't count for much. Interestingly, this same author later recounts an episode in which a boy was not only eager to run an errand to the office but in fact “would do anything to get out of the room” where she was teaching. Rather than reflecting on what this might say about the kind of classroom she had created, the author merely pounces on the possibility of using such errands as rewards to control the student's future behavior (pp. 115–116).
The failure to examine our own actions and values is also reflected in other ways. In 1993, the National Association of Independent Schools sent out surveys to administrators, asking about moral issues they had dealt with. Of 130 surveys returned, only 9 mentioned anything about the values or actions of adults: for 93 percent of the respondents, to raise concerns about moral issues was almost by definition to focus on what children were doing wrong (Palma 1994).
Even if our only concern was to arrive at a more accurate assessment of what is really happening in a classroom, we would need to look hard at what we're asking students to do—and why. The Latin question “Cui bono?”—Who benefits?—should never be far from our minds: In whose interest is it to require students to do this or prohibit them from doing that? The temptation, of course, is to reply instantly that whatever we're demanding is for the children's own good. That's what a 6th grade teacher in northern California said when I asked her why she insisted on sharpening her students' pencils for them: left on their own, she declared, these kids will just grind the things down to little stumps.1
A child in this classroom who believed herself capable of sharpening her own pencil, and did so, would have had to be disciplined since she had “misbehaved” according to the person with the power.
In this example, you or I might suspect that the problem is less the child's disobedience than the teacher's lack of trust or need for control; to think that an 11-year-old cannot handle this task is absurd. The trick, however, is to apply that same sharp scrutiny to our own beliefs and requirements. We need to be tough on ourselves in each instance and ask whether what we're demanding is truly necessary or productive, fair or age-appropriate. That means resisting the impulse to respond reflexively by reaching for some gimmick, whether homegrown or purchased from experts, to get students to fall in line. In other words, it means questioning the very premise of classroom management programs.
How Does the Classroom Feel?
But assume that what we're requesting of students has passed the reasonability test and met the Cui Bono standard. Assume we're talking about an expectation as basic as honesty, and a problem as troubling as lying. Even here I think we have to summon the courage to look at the climate and structure of the classroom and ask whether these may have something to do with the action that disturbs us.
Why do people lie? Usually because they don't feel safe enough to tell the truth. The challenge for us is to examine that precept in terms of what is going on in our classroom, to ask how we and the students together might examine what underlies the lie, and figure out how we can make sure that even unpleasant truths can be told and heard. Does this mean fibbing is acceptable? No. It means the problem has to be dissected and solved from the inside out. It means behaviors occur in a context that teachers have helped to establish; therefore, teachers have to examine and consider modifying that context, even at the risk of some discomfort to themselves.
Contrast this approach with the two major variants of conventional discipline: the Old School insists that we must punish the liar, while the New School counsels gentleness as we try to figure out how to get the student to change his (dishonest) behavior. Is the latter approach preferable? No question about it. But ultimately the two are more similar than different because in both schools the blame rests entirely with the student.
Of course, no one uses the word blame. There's no need, when certain code words will do the job: we're told that the student who lies must be “held accountable”2
or forced to “take responsibility” for the action he “chose.” More generally, “everything [children] do is by their own decision. . . . Nobody makes them do anything, since they themselves decide what they will or will not do” (Dreikurs et al. 1982, p. 174; also see Charney 1991, p. 95).
Thus, in Cooperative Discipline, “all students are held accountable for all their actions . . . allowing no ‘wiggle room’ for escaping personal responsibility” (Albert 1992a, p. 85). A transparency master for this program features an illustration of a girl with her hands on her hips, wearing a self-satisfied smile and a ribbon pinned to her chest—while another student sits unhappily, arms folded, at a desk. The large caption reads: Concept number 1: Students choose their behavior.
We will return (in Chapter 4) to the ways that the concept of choice is used, and misused, in discipline programs. For now, it is enough to notice that “choice” here does not signify a prescription for a democratic classroom, one in which students help to determine what happens. Rather, it is offered (without evidence)3
as a description: Why don't students do what they're told? Because they choose not to.
Adults who blithely insist that children choose to misbehave are rather like politicians who declare that people have only themselves to blame for being poor. In both cases, potentially relevant factors other than personal responsibility are ignored. A young child in particular may not have a fully developed capacity for rational decision making or impulse control that is implicit in suggesting he made a choice. Teachers who think in terms of a lack of skills would be inclined to respond by trying to help the child develop these faculties, rather than by punishing and blaming. Indeed, two researchers recently discovered that the more teachers resorted to saying that a child simply “chose” to act inappropriately, the more likely they were to use punishment and other power-based interventions (Scott-Little and Holloway 1992).
Both educators and politicians are also the very people who benefit most from the claim that people's own choices determine what happens to them. The teacher who invokes the idea of choice has no need to reconsider her own decisions and demands. In the Cooperative Discipline illustration, we are discouraged from asking why the children have been set against each other in a race for artificially scarce rewards, or what the long-term effects of that practice may be on their attitudes about themselves or each other or the task itself, or how other features of the classroom may have contributed to a child's failure. Teachers can simply tell themselves that a student “chose” whatever happened. No questions; no room for confusion.
Thus, that 6th grade teacher might well be able to point to examples where her students had turned healthy pencils into piles of wood shavings and graphite dust. What she may have missed is the way her own mistrustful posture elicited precisely the kind of untrustworthy behavior she predicted, and her tight control just called forth the “need” for more control. We have already become acquainted with the self-fulfilling prophecy. The point here is that when kids play fast and loose with the sharpener—or with the truth—our first question should not be “What do I do to make them stop?” but “What's happening here?” And, even though the answer will often lead us away from the classroom, perhaps into the home, teachers nevertheless would do well to follow that question with another: “Is it possible that decisions I've made and things I do might have some relation to what's happening here?”
What's the Task?
If discipline programs studiously refrain from exploring whether an adult's request was reasonable and, more generally, how the environment created by the adult might have contributed to a student's response, their most salient omission must surely be the curriculum. A huge proportion of unwelcome behaviors can be traced to a problem with what students are being asked to learn.*
The easiest problem to spot is that the tasks they've been given are so simple as to be boring—or, more commonly, too difficult (at least for a given child). It's hard for someone to admit she isn't smart enough to succeed at something; it's a great deal easier to displace that fear of being a failure, or to noisily distract oneself and others from the cause of the problem. Any number of perceptive teachers can tell stories about a student who stopped misbehaving as soon as something happened that made him feel competent: an easier task was presented, or he got help, or he was given more freedom to choose his tasks. And there is empirical research to support the conclusion that “when behavior problems arise in the classroom, one of the first factors to be examined should be instructional procedures and materials and their appropriateness for the offending student” (Center, Deitz, and Kaufman 1982, p. 371).4
Unfortunately, the curricular problems connected to troublesome behavior often go well beyond the difficulty level of assignments. Let's be honest: students frequently perceive the tasks they are given as not worth doing—and sometimes with good reason. Worksheets and textbooks and lectures are often hard to justify pedagogically. Even an assignment that could in principle be worthwhile may fail to engage students because its meaning and relevance were never explained, or because students had nothing to say about how it was to be done.
One of my own major (albeit belated) revelations as a teacher was that behavior problems in my classroom were not due to students' unnatural need for attention or power. The students were acting up mostly to make the time pass faster. And given the skillsbased, decontextualized tasks I was assigning, who could blame them? Back then, I was thinking about a new approach to discipline. What I really needed was a new curriculum.
How do we work with students to create a meaningful curriculum that stretches their thinking, elicits their curiosity, and helps them reflect more skillfully on questions that are already important to them? To some extent, this question contains part of its answer. But the full response that it deserves would take us well beyond the scope of this book. Here the point isn't to describe the model of learning or the kind of tasks that might reduce behavior problems; it's merely to suggest that there is a connection. When students are “off task,” our first response should be to ask, “What's the task?”
That response, however, is rarely heard within the field of classroom management. The point, remember, is to get compliance, to figure out what is wrong with the child who has failed to do an assignment, and then change that behavior. Even “non-disruptive off-task behavior is unacceptable and must be dealt with correctly” (Canter and Canter 1992, p. 163). You will not be surprised to learn that dealing with it “correctly” never seems to require the teacher to think about the assignment itself.
In Cooperative Discipline, much is made of enhancing children's self-esteem, which is said to derive in part from helping them feel “capable.” But this, a video for the program quickly adds, means “capable of completing the academic tasks that we require of them” (Albert 1992b). Programs of classroom management rarely betray any awareness of, much less commitment to, the sort of learning that could be called constructivist or learner-centered. The examples of learning tasks they use are inadvertently revealing, tending toward individual seatwork involving reading textbooks (Canter and Canter 1992, pp. 133–134), completing worksheets and quizzes (Albert, 1989, p. 23), and answering questions such as “Who can tell me what the square root of 16 is?” (Curwin and Mendler 1988, p. 99).
Or consider this passage from Rudolf Dreikurs:
One has to be careful with children who have little or no interest in the assigned classwork. In such cases, allowing them to do what they want may be only an invitation to avoid doing what they are supposed to do (Dreikurs and Grey 1968, p. 192).
This position seems to suggest that one doesn't have to be careful with one's assignments—only with those darned kids who have the nerve to find them uninteresting. The relevant criterion has nothing to do with learning but with doing what one is “supposed to do” (as determined unilaterally by the person in control). One searches in vain here for a real departure from Canter (1988, p. 73), who apparently regards “on-task time” and “learning” as interchangeable concepts.
All of this may be objectionable if only for its fundamentally conservative posture: to take the academic status quo for granted is to perpetuate it. But it also offers a clue to the inherent limits of such an approach. How students act in class is so intertwined with curricular content that it may be folly even to talk about classroom management or discipline as a field unto itself. That is a subversive sentence: taken seriously, it has the potential to subvert the entire field. But how can we deny that the way children act in a classroom is significantly related to their interest in what they've been given to do? Tapping and extending that interest takes time and talent, patience and skill and even courage (in being willing to take a hard look at one's curriculum). Small wonder there is more demand for strategies to get kids to Just Do It.
To put this discussion back in perspective, the curriculum is part of the larger classroom context from which any student's behavior, or misbehavior, emerges. An authentic response to the behavior calls upon us to examine the whole of that context and consider changing it. The failure to do so amounts to blaming the student—which, in turn, gives rise to the familiar tactics of manipulation discussed in the next chapter.