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Lesson Ten: Problems at School
Chapter 1
Discipline and School
“Parents have the important responsibility of helping their children succeed within the guidelines established by the school culture. Their role includes preparing children to begin school, encouraging them to succeed in school, and transmitting values, attitudes, and skills that characterize those who succeed.”
—Dr. Susan McAllister Swap
Discipline problems at school often require parental involvement for effective solutions. In this lesson, you will learn how to deal with problems that include avoiding homework, cheating, and disruptive behavior at school.
Of all of the subjects covered, these are the ones with which I am most familiar: schools, classrooms, teachers, children, and discipline problems. My interest in children and behavior management began over twenty years ago when I was asked to produce a television course for teachers, titled Human Relations and School Discipline. That course served as my introduction not only to distance learning but also to children and discipline. Over the years, I have created and offered eighteen distance-learning courses for educators about how to improve student behavior and learning. Over one hundred colleges have offered those courses, and thousands of teachers have enrolled in them.
Now, you might think that with that huge number of teachers taking my courses, I should be able to relax, content in the knowledge that I have done my part to improve classrooms and schools. I wish that were true. Unfortunately, discipline problems will be a concern of teachers for as long as there are schools, and children to attend them. There are not a finite number of solutions to a finite number of problems. Every year our society and our economy change. Families change, and children change. Old problems wither from lack of attention, but new ones sprout eagerly to take their place. As families and schools evolve, one thing has remained and will continue to remain the same: our basic needs. Once parents and teachers understand that rearing and teaching children are all about recognizing and meeting those needs, then everyone's job becomes easier.
While I have offered a previous course about building home-school relationships, this is my first course designed specifically for parents. But what I am teaching you is the same thing I have taught teachers. My hope is that both teachers and parents can use this same information and work together to help children behave responsibly and succeed in school and in life.
I am also writing my nineteenth course for teachers, Responsibility, Respect, and Relationships: Creating Emotionally Safe Classrooms. (I have resisted referring to the course as one about teaching the new three R’s, but it does seem appropriate.) I find myself writing something for the teacher course and then saying to myself, “I have to tell parents about this.” That happened last evening when I was viewing one of the videos that I had produced to illustrate to teachers my ideas about children’s needs and how they relate to behavior. The video was shot in Truckee, California, very near Lake Tahoe. I was interviewing teachers who were working to put Dr. Glasser’s ideas about basic needs into practice in their classrooms. I want to share a story that one of those teachers told, because I think that it has real relevance in understanding children's needs and their behavior.
Coreen is a teacher at Truckee Elementary School. When I asked her about how discipline problems were related to children's basic needs, she told the following story. Earlier that day, she asked one of her students to work on math problems with a classroom aide. After a few minutes had passed, Coreen looked up to see the little girl stand up and yell at the aide, “I hate you. I hate you.” Then she ran out of the room. Coreen pointed out that in schools with a traditional rules-and-punishment approach to discipline, the little girl would have been apprehended, sent to the principal’s office, and probably suspended. At this school, however, cooperation rather than coercion is the goal. Therefore, Coreen gathered the girl, and once the girl had calmed down, Coreen and the aide had a talk with her. As it turned out, the girl was upset because she couldn’t do the work. She was asked to do three-digit subtraction problems, and she didn’t know how to do them. Yelling at the teacher and running out of the room was the only way she knew how to deal with the frustration and embarrassment. As a result of the meeting, the girl apologized to the aide and was given some alternative behaviors to use when she was frustrated. Most important, Coreen and the girl worked out a plan for her to learn how to subtract.
I use this story as an introduction to this lesson about school problems, to highlight the importance of finding the real reason behind misbehavior. Children do not misbehave to hurt the teacher or to embarrass their parents. Children misbehave because it is the only way they know at a particular time to deal with a problem. It is up to parents (and teachers) to discover which of the child’s needs are not being met and to then find ways to meet that need. The student’s needs for power and recognition were frustrated because she could not do the work given to her. Her anger and misbehavior were her way of dealing with that frustration.
Punishing a child who is already hurting emotionally because she is angry or frustrated will not solve problems at school or at home. Ideally, educating children should be a partnership between school and home. Teachers and parents need to work together to make sure that every child is achieving and behaving to their highest potential. Discipline problems at school as well as at home are golden opportunities to teach. Taking advantage of those opportunities makes for good teaching and good parenting.
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