My school is currently using Conscious Discipline as the main behavior intervention and discipline policy. It is working well as a proactive measure, but it is extremely time consuming & takes away from instruction. It does not work well for reactive discipline. (I think good school programs do both). When a child has hurt some one, knowingly damaged school property, or bullied/threatened another child – it doesn’t work. I am not sure that the program was designed to deal with these behaviors. We are not giving consequences. We are only walking kids through the series of problem solving steps. This includes the more serious behaviors. As a result, we have many students in the office (more than ever) & students with serious behavior problems are not able to understand or rationalize the “Conscious Discipline” way. Our principal is trying to use this as the sole program, & I think that he is confused by it. How is it working for other schools? Is it working?
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It didn’t work in the last school I was in. They called it Love and Logic and everyone, teachers and students, thought it was a joke for exactly that reason – there are no consequences, even for severe behavior. It just gave the “bad” students a pass to do the wrong thing time and time again. We had to sit through many hours of training, which was a HUGE waste of time, and then teachers they didn’t like or who wrote a lot of referrals had to go for more training and have a consultant come observe them.
We found it to be more effective to have a discipline ladder where everyone got more or less the same punishment (the kid and situation were also taken into account, it wasn’t set into stone, but they tried to follow the same general guidelines for all kids) but the deans had problems following through and sticking to it, and as we all know, if you’re not consistent, nothing will work.
When we started the year by really cracking down on the basics – gum, dress code, respect – we found the year went much more smoothly. We also started arresting kids who were in fights – I think we charged them with assault and battery (depending on how bad it was), and disrupting a school function – and the number of fights went right down. But when they stopped, the number of fights went back up.
Positive behavior reinforcement and problem solving are terrific and do have their place, but there also has to be some form of punishment for those kids who don’t respond to the positives and choose to break the rules and make poor behavior choices.