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Classroom Discipline: Consequences

© Thomas Robertson

I recently saw a child throwing a deck of playing cards up in the air and catching it on the way down. A teacher approached the child and asked, "What were you thinking when you were throwing those cards in the air."

The child replied - you guessed it - "I dunno?"

I agree whole-heartedly in the value of two-way communication, but I also realize that children have limited ability to communicate in the abstract. I wondered how we could resolve this dilemma, so I posed this question to the discipline mailing list. Here are some answers which I got back:

suggest alternatives

Now that I think of it, Rudolf Dreikurs, author of Logical Consequences, has a similar suggestion. He would pose the following questions:

"Do you want more attention?"

"Do you want more power?"

"Are you angry?"

"Do you feel stupid and feel the need to cover it up?"

From the information given by the student, Dreikurs suggests, you can now form a plan for alleviating the cause of the student's misbehavior.

I have noticed that students get fidgety when they have been sitting still for too long. So I would suggest still a fifth question:

"Are you wanting to release some energy?"

If the answer to this question is "yes," then perhaps you can design an activity which involves gross motor activity and learning the material at the same time.

Ask "What are you doing?"

Another has found that asking the question "What are you doing?" gets the students to think about their own behavior. "This question does not put the child on the defensive. Rather, they are asked to identify the behavior and in so doing think about it!"

How about also asking the what-are-you-doing question to students who are doing as instructed, as well as students who are not doing as instructed? Not only would this make the question less threatening, it would help preserve the question's self-introspective power.

Ask "Is _____ doing what I told the class to do?"

In my last substitute assignment, I made a twist on the above idea by asking "Is _____ doing what I told the class to do?" in reference to an offending student. The usual answer was "no." Then I repeated the question in reference to several other students, purposely mixing "yes" questions and "no" questions.

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I found that this technique has the benefit of making it more difficult for offending students to protest their innocence; they would have to confront not only me, but their classmates.

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