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The School Day Experience
CHAPTER 6
Adjusting Discipline for Compassion
In the previous chapter, we outlined the supportive discipline framework for managing behavior while also supporting students’ use of prosocial skills. Here, we offer ways to show compassion while ensuring that discipline is respectful of students’ needs. We offer a compassionate response from a place of understanding. We believe it is necessary to first attempt to understand the complex chronic behaviors (including escalation patterns) of students and then proceed with direct intervention.
Managing student behavior is a challenge for many educators (Gonzalez, Brown, & Slate, 2008; Scholastic, & Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013), and when we add on the layer of students who have increased social, emotional, or behavioral (SEB) needs or who have experienced trauma, effective discipline can be tricky. Students dealing with such life stressors may escalate more quickly when facing discipline, so teachers have to manage challenging behavior tactfully (Pickens & Tschopp, 2017). To do so, teachers can build off the established structures for consistency and connection in their classroom and slightly adjust them for students with SEB needs. Based on students’ specific needs or their current emotional state, teachers can adjust the strategies we’ve described so far throughout this book to meet their students’ needs.
This isn’t to say that teachers throw consistency out the window with some students. Rather, there is an art to working with real students and applying strategies.
