School Discipline Survey

Are your school's discipline practices in line with what we now know about why students exhibit challenging behavior?  Take the brief survey below to find out!

  1. My school relies very heavily on adult-imposed consequences – such as detentions, suspensions, paddling, and other punishments – in responding to challenging behavior.
  2. In my school, classroom teachers frequently send students to someone outside the classroom – for example, the principal or assistant principal – to deal with behavior problems.
  3. In meetings about students with behavioral challenges, discussions focus primarily on behaviors rather than on lagging skills and unsolved problems.
  4. Terms such as manipulative, attention-seeking, unmotivated, coercive, and limit-testing are frequently used to describe students with behavioral challenges.
  5. Our Functional Behavior Assessments focus on how a student’s challenging behaviors are working to enable him or her to get, escape, and avoid rather than on the fact that the behaviors communicate that the student is lacking the skills to respond more adaptively.
  6. The philosophy guiding our thinking about behaviorally challenging kids is Kids do well if they want to rather than Kids do well if they can.
  7. In responding to challenging behaviors, the school relies heavily on a rubric system: a list of behaviors students mustn’t exhibit and an algorithm for how adults should respond to those behaviors if they are exhibited.
  8. There are many “frequent flyers” in the school:  students whose behavior has not improved despite frequent exposure to the school discipline program.
  9. The problems precipitating students’ challenging behavior seem to occur again and again without ever being durably solved.
  10. We’re still blaming parents for the challenging behavior their children exhibit at school rather than on collaborating with them to understand the lagging skills contributing to that challenging behavior.
  11. Our response to students’ challenging behavior is primarily emergent and reactive rather than planned and proactive.  

If you answered yes to any or many of these questions, your school may need a discipline overhaul...and Lives in the Balance can help! Contact us to find out how we can work together to get the ball rolling. 

How did your school do? What areas still need the most work? How will you organize the effort and galvanize people? Tell us about it!