Discipline in K through 8th Grade Classrooms

Introduction Lack of discipline has several times since 1968 topped the annual Gallup Poll of Public Attitudes towards public schools as the major problem schools have to face (Schottle & Peltier, 1991). The way teachers solve this problem will determine how well students learn and perform in the classroom (Buck, 1992). However, all too often teachers are unaware of the effectiveness of the discipline and classroom management techniques they adopt (Almeida, 1995; Rosen, Taylor, O'Leary, & Sanderson, 1990). Being a source of anxiety and uncertainty (Almeida, 1995), lack of discipline leads to teachers' stress, burnout (Schottle & Peltier, 1991), and inability to care about students (Chemlynski, 1996). This study aimed at finding out, based on direct classroom observations, the discipline problems teachers most often encountered in K through 8th grade classrooms, and the techniques they adopted to solve them. Theoretical Background & Literature Review Misbehavior in the classroom has been defined as students' actions that distracts from, disrupts, competes with, or threatens learning in the classroom (McCown, Driscoll, Roop, 1996). These may range from the benign act of dropping a pencil to serious acts of aggression. Based on 254 narratives submitted by 137 student teachers, the three discipline problems most frequently encountered in the classroom were reported to be acts of disruption such as talking and fidgeting, acts of defiance such as disrespectful behavior and disobedience, and acts of inattention such as being off task, not doing one's work, or out of seat. These 3 categories encompassed respectively 50, 20 and 9 percent of the misbehavior. The remainder included acts of verbal and physical aggression and other miscellaneous acts such as crying, lying, cheating, stealing, or gum chewing, which respectively accounted for 4 and 5 percent of all the incidents of misbehavior (Tulley & Chiu, 1995). Some educators (Dreikurs, 1968; Glasser, 1986) perceived the occurrence of discipline problems to be the consequence of students' frustration and lack of opportunity to fulfill basic needs within the confines of the classroom. Students may feel pleasure or frustration depending on whether they will be empowered to meet their needs for fun, reedom (Glasser, 1986), and belong (Dreikurs, 1968). However, schools rarely create the proper conditions to meet these needs and rarely allow students to work to their full potential. Consequently, students misbehave by adopting mistaken attitudes, goals, and behaviors such as power, or revenge, while giving up trying to meet academic and social expectations (Buck, 1992; Dreikurs, 1968; Glasser, 1986). Gartrell (1995) draws our attention to the difference between misbehavior and mistaken behavior. Misbehavior implies that the student has intentionally done something wrong and must be punished. In contrast, mistaken behavior merely implies that a mistake has been made in the process of learning. Based on Piaget's developmental stages, students gradually learn to overcome their natural tendency toward egocentrism while acquiring the skill of taking others' perspectives (Schickedanz, 1994). Errors in judgment often occur in the process of becoming socially competent. Autonomous exploring of the surroundings and harmless experimentation may also lead to mistaken behavior (Dreikurs, 1968; Gartrell, 1995a). Traditionally, teachers reacted to unacceptable behavior by shaming, verbally reprimanding, threatening, embarrassing, paddling, and suspending or expelling the misbehaving student (Gartrell, 1995b; Gettinger, 1988; Johnson, 1994). These punitive methods often stigmatized the students who internalized the labels "mean", "bad", or "crazy" and by misbehaving, reflected back to the teacher the negative labels he/she had applied on them (Gartrell, 1995b). Since 1970, the management of discipline problems no longer focuses on punishment and retribution, but on conflict resolution and guidance (Gartrell, 1995b). …