And, yet, we failed Matt
Meet Matt.
At six feet and almost two hundred pounds, he was clearly a misfit in middle school. By looking at him, you could tell that he was also a few years older than his classmates. His grades, not surprisingly, were within the broad range of Ds and Fs, and yet he was promoted each year to the next class.
I taught him for a year when he came to high school, and got to know him beyond his reputation as one of those ‘slipping through the cracks’.
In fact, when I inherited him, I was warned by his previous teacher about how he would amount to nothing. (There is an alarming trend in some schools where teachers warn their colleagues about how terrible some students were in their classes in previous years.)
He had all the trappings of a rich home – fancy clothes, expensive sneakers, the latest smartphones and a personal set of hot wheels parked outside school. He was loaded with cash and did not hesitate to buy his buddies a treat or two at lunch break.
He was courteous with me at all times – he’d have this childlike smile on his face when he’d bow his head ever so slightly in greeting. And while his grades did not rise to astronomical heights, they did stay out of the F-range for most of the year: he handled tasks better if you broke them down for him.
As an ELL student Matt had strong affective barriers to learning because classes were conducted in a language that he was not yet proficient in; his assignments were not differentiated, as there was no system-wide commitment to providing him with support. Such support was understood to be a decision left to individual teachers, irrespective of whether they were qualified or willing to make them.
Sent out of the class for every little infraction, handed detention as a matter of routine and labeled a “perpetrator”, it is little wonder then that Matt was a self-fulfilling prophecy on two feet! He spent more time in detention than in a classroom learning. And all the while, the ‘system’ waited for Matt to quietly graduate himself out.
This leads me to the ‘discipline code’ of any school, that is in principle and practice a device to manage student behaviour. Irrespective of local contexts, all discipline codes must comprise The Four Ps. These are best understood as responses to a series of questions:
Purpose:
Why is there a discipline code in the first place? Is it to maintain order or to keep students safe? Is it designed to punish students for bad behaviour or to reward them for good? Does it aim at instilling in them a self-checking mechanism or is the aim to force them to conform?
Policy:
Is the discipline code a written document that is transparent and easy to access? Do all stakeholders know what it looks like and why it is there? Is it reviewed periodically to keep pace with changing times (and laws of the land)? Is it applied fairly and consistently across all students?
Protocol:
Are there step-by-step methods to review and document every ‘discipline’ case? Do all stakeholders know what they are? Is the approach to discipline a dialogue rather than a set of draconian laws? Do protocols aim to find a solution or simply record the problem? What are the privacy settings of such discipline codes?
Person:
To what extent does the school’s discipline code consider the “person” at the centre: the student? How does the school build a safe learning environment and a culture of respect that students come to trust? What is the school’s attitude to failure? What language is deemed appropriate for all stakeholders to use when dealing with students?
These are not difficult questions to answer, are they?
And, yet, we failed Matt.
therefore, 