Kind discipline: Developing a conceptual model of a promising school discipline approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2017.02.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • “Clear expectations” was rated most important and feasible among all kind discipline statements.

  • The components of kind discipline cut across all levels of a social ecological model.

  • Beyond positive school climate, kind discipline addresses responding to conflict skillfully.

Abstract

This formative evaluation develops a novel conceptual model for a discipline approach fostering intrinsic motivation and positive relationships in schools. We used concept mapping to elicit and integrate perspectives on kind discipline from teachers, administrators, and other school staff. Three core themes describing kind discipline emerged from 11 identified clusters: (1) proactively developing a positive school climate, (2) responding to conflict with empathy, accountability, and skill, and (3) supporting staff skills in understanding and sharing expectations. We mapped the identified components of kind discipline onto a social ecological model and found that kind discipline encompasses all levels of that model including the individual, relational, environmental/structural, and even community levels. This contrasts with the dominant individual-behavioral discipline approaches that focus on fewer levels and may not lead to sustained student and staff motivation. The findings illustrate the importance of setting and communicating clear expectations and the need for them to be collaboratively developed. Products of the analysis and synthesis reported here are operationalized materials for teachers grounded in a “be kind” culture code for classrooms.

Introduction

Current school discipline approaches, particularly the use of suspension, are problematic for students and school communities. To counter this, there has been a rise in more positive, rewards-based approaches, though there may be unintended consequences of these approaches. Effective alternatives to these paradigms have not been widely disseminated. This formative evaluation develops a novel conceptual model for an alternative discipline approach based on developing intrinsic motivation and positive interpersonal relationships within schools.

An astonishing number of students in the United States are suspended each year. Over 3.5 million public school students missed school due to a suspension at least once in the 2011–12 school year (Losen, Hodson, Keith, Morrison, & Belway, 2015). Suspensions last an average of three days (Losen et al., 2015). This amounts to U.S. public school children losing almost 18 million days of instruction each school year (Losen et al., 2015).

Recent data suggest that suspensions are associated with a range of negative outcomes for both the students being suspended and their school communities. Suspension has been associated with decreased high school graduation rates, increased high school dropout rates, and decreased odds of enrolling in postsecondary school (Balfanz, Byrnes, & Fox, 2015; Fabelo et al., 2011, Shollenberger, 2015). Suspensions are also associated with mental health problems, including persistent depressive symptoms and suicide (Gould, Fisher, Parides, Flory, & Shaffer, 1996; Rushton, Forcier, & Schectman, 2002).

Although suspensions have been conceptualized as removing students causing trouble so other students can work effectively, data suggest that high rates of suspension are not good for school climate, i.e., the quality and character of school life (National School Climate Center, 2016). School climate integrates the experience of life at school for students, parents, and school personnel. It also incorporates norms, goals, values, and interpersonal relationships, as well as organizational structures and the teaching and learning practices in a school (National School Climate Center, 2016). A Kentucky study found that from all stakeholder perspectives, including administrators, teachers and students, school climate was experienced as more positive in schools that had lower rates of suspension compared to schools that had higher rates of school suspension (Bickel & Qualls, 1980). Similarly, suspensions erode school connectedness, the belief by students that teachers and school peers care about their learning as well as about them as individuals. In schools where punishments for infractions are more likely to include suspensions, students experience less connectedness to the school (McNeely, Nonnemaker, & Blum, 2002). While correlation should not be confused with causation, these associations between suspensions and negative outcomes raise concerns that warrant further investigation.

In recognition of these associations with punitive discipline, there has been a nationwide shift towards a positive behavioral approach with a core focus on rewards. Perhaps the most popular approach is School Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), implemented in most states and supported by the U.S. Department of Education (Spaulding, Horner, May, & Vincent, 2008). Even with technical support available, PBIS initiatives have been difficult to maintain with fidelity within a school, and have proven even more challenging across districts or at state levels (Lohrmann, Forman, Martin, & Palmieri, 2008; Sugai & Horner, 2006). Studies of PBIS implementation have identified barriers to implementation and sustained use including a lack of administrative leadership; skepticism by staff about a need for this type of intervention; the perception that the intervention isn’t applicable or feasible; lack of staff expertise to implement the highly-manualized intervention; teaching in a high-stress environment that may make staff feel hopeless about change; and staff concerns about the reward system (Kincaid, Childs, Blase, & Wallace, 2007; Lohrmann et al., 2008). Although rewards may help control behavior, critics note that they can undermine people’s sense of responsibility and motivation for regulating themselves (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999). Rewards have also been found to decrease pro-social behavior. Students paid to provide a reading for a blind person in one study reported less moral obligation to help in a similar future circumstance as compared to those not offered payment for the same activity (Kunda & Schwartz, 1983). In a different study of elementary school children, those who received material rewards for helping others were less inclined to be generous (Smith, Gelfand, & Hartmann, 1979).

There has also been growing interest in integrating restorative practices into school settings. The restorative practices movement was initiated in criminal justice arenas and has extended to include an approach to discipline that involves addressing the harms, needs, and obligations of an offense by bringing together those who have a stake in the offense to heal and put things as right as possible (Zehr, 2002). Restorative practices have been implemented widely within the states of California, Colorado, Florida, and Minnesota as well as in Australia, Canada, England, Hong Kong, Scotland, and Wales (Gregory, Clawson, Davis, & Gerewitz, 2014; Schiff, 2013). Restorative practices in schools were pioneered in Australia with a 1994 restorative justice conference in response to an assault at a school-sanctioned event, followed by expansion of restorative justice to over 100 Australian schools (Fronius, Persson, Guckenburg, Hurley, & Petrosino, 2016). While no randomized controlled trials of restorative practices in schools have been completed to date, school record data have shown drops in suspensions and office referrals (International Institute for Restorative Practices, 2014; Karp and Breslin, 2001, Simson, 2012; Stinchcomb, Bazemore, & Riestenberg, 2006). Denver Public School implementation has been notable in that restorative practices have been brought to scale throughout a school district; in that setting, the district’s overall suspension rate declined from 10.6% to 5.6% (Gonzalez, 2015). Although restorative practices programs have demonstrated some promising results, implementation challenges have been identified, particularly the requirement for broad institutional commitment, tensions between restorative principles and prevailing punishment-based practices for school discipline, and assuring adequate training for staff (Sherman & Strang, 2007).

There remains a need for carefully considered revisions to the current system of school discipline to develop practices that honor the integrity of the child, support high-functioning classrooms and schools, and support long term motivation and social development. There is also a need for a school discipline approach that addresses infractions in a manner that is geared toward bringing offenders back into the fold of the school community rather than pushing them out, putting them at further risk for dropout and unhealthy behaviors.

This formative assessment defines an alternate approach for school discipline that is grounded in neither individual punitive exclusionary nor reward-based systems, but rather supports students in thriving. In partnership with a local movement focused on intentional kindness, we set out to formulate this new “kind discipline” model based on the experience of core school-based stakeholders.

Section snippets

Project goals and evaluation setting

This work grew out of a partnership amongst a research university, a grassroots community organization, and teachers, administrators, and students at schools implementing intentional kindness programming. The overall goal of the grassroots organization, the Ben’s Bells Project, is to inspire, educate, and motivate people to realize the impact of intentional kindness. “Kind Campus” is their school-based program which began in 2007 in four Arizona schools and has now been adopted in over 400

Results

Multidimensional scaling analysis located each statement within a point map as shown in Fig. 1. Each circle on the point map represents a statement. Statements that were sorted together more often were physically closer on the map than statements sorted together less often. These are demonstrated by exemplars of statements from three different clusters in Fig. 1. The stress index—a measure of the goodness of fit between the input matrix data and the distances represented on the map was 0.306.

Clusters

Overall, participant ratings of importance and feasibility of the statements within kind discipline were high. On a scale of 1–5, the cluster with the lowest average importance was 3.98. The feasibility ratings were also generally high, with the lowest scoring cluster having a feasibility rating of 3.28. Feasibility was consistently rated lower than importance for every cluster. Participants may see change in this context as complex and challenging. Yet the overall high scores reflect an

Lessons learned

Concept mapping was a useful approach for integrating perspectives from a broad spectrum of stakeholders into a conceptual model. The perspectives of students, administrators, teachers, and other school staff were effectively engaged in collaboratively constructing an understanding of kind discipline. This process included student perspectives in the brainstorming stage of the concept mapping process as this has been a phase in concept mapping where students have been able to participate fully (

Conclusion

The current study used concept mapping and multiple analytic methods to specify, refine and integrate an alternative school discipline approach whose core principles are neither reward- nor punishment-based. This “kind discipline” model had 11 clusters identified and clarified three core themes of (1) proactively developing a positive school climate, (2) responding to conflict with empathy, accountability, and skill, and (3) supporting staff skills in understanding and sharing expectations. The

Funding

This work was supported in part by a grant from the University of Arizona Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. The funding source had no involvement in the conduct of the research or the preparation of the article.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Ben’s Bells for their support for this project. We are also deeply grateful to the school staff, administrators, and students who volunteered their time to participate in this project. We thank Deanna Kaplan for sharing her experience with concept mapping and for her support in the brainstorming and statement analysis phases of this project.

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