August 19, 2024
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Prefer audio? Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast episode to hear Aleta read this issue.
Each year, as part of our programming for teachers, my colleagues and I ask our teacher-participants what they think of when they hear the word Discipline.
We write Discipline on the whiteboard (or on old-school chart paper, my preferred method), and ask the group “What does this word mean?” My colleagues and I capture teachers’ responses. They tend to include words like…
Rules
Regulations
Consequences
Punishment
Detention
Rigor
Behavior charts
Behavior modification plans
Classroom management
We keep brainstorming as long as the words keep coming. And it’s not unusual to fill up three or four full sheets of chart paper. Once the group has come up with as many definitions as possible, we pause, and invite teachers to close their eyes and imagine themselves as great artists.
We challenge them to be specific, asking, “What kind of artist are you? If you are a musician, what’s your instrument, what’s your musical style? If you are a dancer, what type of dance do you perform? If you are a visual artist, what’s your medium? Sculpture? Watercolors?”
We then ask them to imagine how they spend their days, how they work on their craft, who they interact with, how they spend their time strengthening their craft both in preparation or rehearsal and in exhibition or performance.
Then we invite teachers to open their eyes. We reveal a brand new piece of chart paper with the word Discipline written on it. We ask, “From your perspective now as an artist, what does discipline mean?”
We write as quickly as we can, while teachers call out words like…
Focus
Dedication
Trial and error
Creativity
Frustration
Overcoming obstacles
Joy
Persistence
Intrinsic motivation
Passion
Needless to say, the purpose of the exercise is to invite our teaching colleagues to redefine the concept of Discipline. In this redefinition, discipline is about freedom of expression, not conformity. Discipline is curiosity driven by focus and self-motivation — not compliance driven by punishment. In such a context, school discipline looks like students, and teachers, deeply engaged in doing work that matters, to them and to their community.
This reimagining of Discipline includes room for having clear expectations, along with consequences, both for meeting and not meeting those expectations. In fact, this kind of aspirational discipline expects far more of students, because they are not expected simply to comply with someone else’s rules. They are instead expected to go through the process of creating their own rules, figuring out what they themselves need in order to thrive, and living with and by those rules.
Next week special guest, Honorable David Tatel, who served as a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals until 2023, will speak about why, and how, to engage students in the deliberative process of creating their own classroom rules. I can’t wait to share Judge Tatel’s wisdom with you all!
As you embark on a new school year with your learning community, I invite you to engage in your own creative process and define Discipline with intention. Even better, engage in this exercise with your students, so that your agreed-upon definition of Discipline can serve as your class’ North Star all year long.
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Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication by Center for Inspired Teaching, an independent nonprofit organization that invests in and supports teachers. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Our mission is to create radical change in the school experience – away from compliance and toward authentic engagement.