18. Who Benefits?

 #66Challenge

 

(November 21, 2021)

 

As I work through life after my breakdown a few weeks ago, more and more things are coming my way that are confirming my direction. Some are things I've studied in the past, and some are new to me. All are inspiring me and giving me motivation.

With a week off school I was looking forward to just resting my mind. But with so much information coming my way, I've been processing, processing, processing. After several day so of this, I felt it was time to get it down in some kind of form as a way to track this journey which, after all, the #66Challenge is about.

Following will be a series of things that happened for me this week, this being the first entry.

On the first Sunday of my break, I returned to Alfie Kohn's book Beyond Discipline. It really hit home, mostly because I had a very difficult day on Friday, and I was still reeling from my part in it.

One of the things I've struggled with the most is that since the beginning of school I was using our discipline program with fidelity, but weeks later, absolutely nothing had changed. All it had done was cause a lot of grief, misery, and frustration -- both for me and my learners.

Kohn makes it clear that curriculum is intertwined with discipline. This from page 21:

How students act in class is so intertwined with curricular content that be may be folly even to talk about classroom management or discipline as a field unto itself. That is a subversive sentence: taken seriously, it has the potential to subvert the entire field.

He urges us to use two words when deciding anything: Who benefits? Be it the curriculum or some kind of action taken on a student because of misbehavior, who benefits from what is decided?

I had seen for myself that the discipline system isn't benefiting anyone, least of all me.  The time it takes to write and follow up these things, well, there are certainly better uses of my time.

Kohn points out that it is a false dichotomy of either punish or "let them get away with it." He says we will never move away from punitive tactics unless we dismiss the idea that it is either/or. 

As I read it I realized that I had naturally given up on the system in place, largely because I was trying to listen and BE with my learners more, to see thing through their eyes. The boring curriculum we are straddled with is one of the things I'm seeing and, sadly, there is little I can do about some of it. If Kohn is correct that curriculum and behavior are intertwined, then I am battling against a bigger problem than just whether I use PBIS or not.

At least that is my initial reaction. As the week wore on, I opened my mind to some new ideas. Just trying to think about a "replacement" for discipline, or how to make my lessons more enticing is only one small part. There is so much more, which I am slowly discovering.