I Don't Hit Them and I'd Never Want To!!!

These days, of course, in places like Boston, teachers don't kids. Of, if they do, they face enormous trouble. I joke with my friends that as a teacher with tenure in a large urban district, I can teach miserably for years and years and comfortably keep my job, but that if I touch a kid, I'm out. And for good reason. The recent history of corporal punishment in schools has been ugly. Jonathan Kozol, in Savage Inequalities, exposed the brutality of the disipline as practiced in the Boston Public Schools over 40 years ago in his landmark work, Death at an Early Age. Just this year, I've read that in regions of the United States where teachers can still hit children, the discipline is applied with some disturbing patterns of injustice. Black students and those with special education needs are hit disproportionately, and parental release forms and mandatory parental notification policies are routinely ignored. So that's not a great track record in the whole kid-hitting direction.

What's funny is that when I talk about this issue with friends outside of publication, they speak with more ambivalence about the issue, as if they admit that teachers shouldn't be allowed to physically discipline children but that they must secretly - or maybe somewhat less secretly - wish they could. Two friends I spoke with this week wistfully recalled their own days in elementary school - on in Massachusetts Catholic schools and one in Texas public schools - when they and their friends were routinely smacked or paddled by teachers when they got into trouble.

I wonder how many of my colleagues, if you caught them in a totally honest or even mildly inebriated moment, would confess to the desire to smack, spank, or whack a misbehaving student now and then. I suspect that many wouldn't want that responsibility or would oppose it on other grounds, but I also know quite a few that wish they had this weapon in their arsenal. I use the military metaphor with intention because many insiders and outsiders to public education see many students as unruly and irresponsible by nature, in need of regular, strict, and severe correction and training to stay in line. Many view our poorer and darker-skinned students in particular in this light. Even if teachers can't or shouldn't hit kids, perhaps they should correct, discipline, and manage through stern authority-based methods. You see this assumption in the teacher that yells at her kids, in the hulk of a vice principal who walks the halls with seriousness, in the lining up and shutting up that so many of our young children are subjected to.

I, on the other hand, don't see the young men and women I teach and lead as primarily unruly, difficult, tough, or wayward, and I certainly don't see one of my main goals as "keeping them in line." I want them to find paths to success and achievement in their lives and for them to participate in making good decisions about their own habits and behaviors.

I'm really grateful that my school has a philosophy of management and discipline that is less authoritarian and yet more effective in reaching my goals. We practice cooperative discipline, so named because teachers cooperate with students, parents, and other partners as necessary to help students make good choices about their habits and behaviors. This philosophy believes that people thrive when they feel they are capable, connected, and contributing, and they tend to behave poorly when they feel a need for attention, power, or revenge, or when they are afraid of failing. My goal in praciting cooperative discipline with students is to figure out, when students misbehave, why they are acting that way and how I can help them connect, contribute, or feel more capable. The goal is to present students with natural consequences of their own behavior and to help them understand the choices they have in every situation. For, as the film Spiderman II reminded us, we always have a choice.

I did some brief training around this philosophy and practice with the staff at my school yesterday and came away grateful for the options it gives us in dealing with students who act in ways that hurt a classroom learning environment. So many of our defaults for dealing with these behaviors as teachers, or as humans really, are either bitter or authoritarian or both, and they neither help the student nor make us feel good about ourselves. We yell at kids or fill out reports without any personal follow-up, both of which undermine relationships and accomplish nothing. Or we gripe about students to our colleagues or lower students' grades, both of which are petty, and again, accomplish nothing. Or we go as far as to call home, but only notify parents of a problem or even complain about their child, rather than trying to build a relationship where all parties can look out for the young person's best interests and success.

Cooperative discipline encourages us to think of alternatives: to get to know a student, to find ways to include him or her in the life of the classroom, to always think through the consequences and alternatives to a student's behaviors and try to present those thoughtfully to that student.

I don't think many people get into education because they want to control, abuse, or otherwise boss around young people. Well, on second thought, there may be more than a few of those types around. But I believe that most enter the work to help young people succeed and thrive, and to have a good time doing it. Cooperative discipline is a great tool toward both of those goals. And even for those professionals who may have entered the game for other reasons, it's a chance for them to retool their game and find healthier ways of navigating their professional frustrations.

Yelling at kids or complaining about them or even, God forbid, hitting them, doesn't seem to do that so well.