California Enacts First-in-the-Nation Law to Eliminate Student Suspensions for Minor Misbehavior [FixSchoolDiscipline.org]

Thank you for posting this for everyone's awareness. It caused me to reflect back on my own time in the classroom and how this kind of legislation 20 years ago would have change much of the conversation during the time (circa 95-97) I was preparing to become a teacher.

As a special education teacher at the secondary level for 7 years in a rural district in Washington State, I entered the profession at a time when "high stakes testing" was just ramping up, high profile cases of on-campus violence were occurring across the nation, and there was a significant level of fear among staff that their student roster might include a "dangerous" student. I felt I had a very solid understanding of adolescent  development and behavior - or at a minimum that I was well-prepared by the pre-service training I had received to meet the many challenges that would be coming my way. 

Over the next seven years I  learned something that no book I had read in pre-service training had ever said so plainly:   if a student knows you're "in their corner," you don't need to "corner them."  

Every student I worked with had a documented disability (by definition) that adversely impacted the way they accessed learning and therefore each needed to have some forethought put into the design of their learning conditions.  But if there's any area that causes educators (and education in general) a significant challenge, it is in the area of designing learning conditions proactively to ensure positive engagement for all students is the consistent result. 

I learned that students responded much better without ultimatums for trivial offenses. No pencil, no problem? We had an unspoken rule that if a student didn't bring a pencil that day, they could grab one from the "pencil box" located in the room. Why was this done? Didn't I know that I was sealing that student to a life of menial tasks, unemployment, and potentially worse?  

Aside from the fact that there were some students who literally would not ever (and I mean EVER) bring a pencil to school, I (slowly) recognized that many of these students had learned from other teachers that if they didn't have a pencil - this would be a ticket out of expectations,out of assignments, and in some cases - out of school.  It was also a ticket out of learning.  By taking that option for what I call "contrived failure" away from them, we kept the focus on learning. There was no "opt out" because I genuinely wanted to keep the focus on their learning. Simply put, whenever learning stops - bad things tend to happen.  

To some, this was tantamount to enabling! How will this child/adolescent who can't even remember to bring a pencil as a 16 year old EVER function in society?!?   My response - well given that this child is already functionally the head of her household, works two jobs, looks after younger siblings and has little/no positive adult presence in their life, and we could probably predict an ACE Score of 5+ - that they keep showing up to this school speaks volumes about who they might become if we don't make it about them remembering to bring a pencil to class.

To borrow a line from Washington State's Heart of Learning: Compassion, Resiliency, and Academic Success, focusing on whether a student under these circumstances can remember to bring her pencil is like asking her to "play chess in a hurricane."

I knew that as an adult I found something very insulting about an approach that would make "criminals" out of students who were passively defiant (e.g., of the pencil forgetting variety), so why shouldn't a child/adolescent attempting to make sense of the world feel insulted as well?  It wasn't until I attended several workshops on the topic of "discipline with dignity" and "positive discipline" and "choice theory" that I had words to put around my own experiences as a professional. 

The truth is my pre-service training in traditional education methods (stimulus-behavior-response or sbr approaches) failed to provide me the necessary mindset to understand that students will engage adults/professionals in more "love and logic" approaches - but only as they attune to you as being a trustworthy, safe, caring and competent adult. What I had no idea about (circa 1997 entering the classroom) was that many of the students I was working with had no viable experience with what a "trustworthy, safe, caring and competent adult" looked like. They had no context or experience which would allow them to make sense of me as a trustworthy, safe, caring and competent adult. 

Early in my career - anxious to "help" learners stay engaged - I did exert external control methods with the belief thatif I put a tremendous amount of thought into re-arranging the stimuli in just a particular order I could orchestrate a particular desired outcome that would be satisfactory. What I failed to understand is just how little equipping, empowering and learning was occurring within the learner. Almost everything was externally manipulated by me. 

My approach worked on occasion - mostly with learners who were only intermittently off-task and would have responded favorably to a minor re-direction from a complete stranger.  I falsely concluded that there was "pedagogical gold in them thar hills!" and felt that when my approach didn't work that it could be attributed (aka, blamed) on - you guessed it -  the student in question who was being openly defiant.

It's probably an exaggeration to make the point here, but I couldn't imagine a world that these high school students who "misbehaved" or were "openly defiant" weren't all part of some secret conspiracy to see if I could make it in the profession. They had to be! Instead of looking for the "why" behind their behavior (or some truly unmet need) I far too often stared only at the form of the behavior, or what it looked like to me.

And what did it look like?

As any secondary teacher can tell you - whatever the student's behavior was could be described in a few short sentences - just enough information so that a busy administrator could know that as a busy teacher "I had had it with this student!"

It looked like a few sentences on a piece of paper or a form that said "Office Referral" at the top. It clearly spelled out "the charges" and described what the student did - or the form of the behavior-  and not why the student may have felt it was completely rational  to do so.  I did this until I noticed a trend in myself and my colleagues as many of the students on my IEP caseload were "getting run" (ie, sent out to the Principal's Office) for very minor infractions. Suffice it to say, I spent many hours "in the Principal's Office" watching the "usual suspects" getting "the usual consequence" and learning the usual thing - nothing.

This started to bother me. It was too easy. It wasn't helping. And worse, it felt like it was manufacturing failure and if students took it to heart - failures. I decided to try to find a new way of looking at things that honored the interest of academic achievement standards, held students accountable, and provided students a way to find a way to be successful. 

In special education terms, I started learning how to conduct "functional behavioral assessments" in milli-seconds. I stopped writing every little thing they did "wrong" down on an office referral. I stopped looking for my own tipping point (ala Gladwell) and looked for their tipping point toward learning.  I stopped engaging students with ultimatums and positional directives - and I started engaging students with a sense of curiosity - "What had happened in this child's life to put them in a cognitive/emotional/psychological space where they acted out or shut down under certain circumstances?"  I also started teaming with parents to better understand what may have happened in the now-high schooler's life that had contributed to some of their context. 

I learned that the high school students who were our "frequent flyers" had tremendously complex personal histories including but certainly not limited to: family incarceration, being in foster system, personal sexual contact abuse, emotional abuse, divorce, domestic violence, extreme poverty,  death/suicide of a close relative, drug-dependency, etc.  I had no real language to describe the kinds of needs my student population were experiencing and then expressing through their behavior.  

You see, I learned from my students that they were using behavior as a means of expressing their pain. Their circumstances had given them no other "vocabulary" so their behavior had become their language.

Of course, every adult who is "in charge" of a group of students has expectations placed on them by society, by their employer, by their colleagues, by parents (etc) to keep children/adolescents "under control." And in any climate of fear/distrust/animosity looms around every corner - whether it be a family, a school, a juvenile detention facility or a jail  - these types of collective pressures to exert a formidable force "against individuals" in very overt ways promotes aggression, instills fear, escalates stress, and results in outcomes that are well documented.  The insidious part is that when these strategies "work" they actuallyaren't working to equip learners at all. In what ways do students learn to: think critically, assess options, ask questions, learn to disengage, view themselves as a resource, feel empowered to grow and persevere, etc.

I am very optimistic that the legislation in California will lead to improved learning conditions for all learners, and not just those who the administrators regard as "frequent flyers" in the Principal's Office.  I am optimistic that if/as students are provided improved learning conditions where they experience school connectedness, a compassionate ear from a trusted adult, and ways to find their way back into learning conditions they find engaging - that discipline scenarios will become truly associated with more substantive matters (drugs, weapons, violence).

It should not be lost in this discussion about what legislation can/can't do that even those behaviors - even extremely dangerous ones - may be the result of students using the only "vocabulary," or language,  they know to express their pain and frustration at a world that asks them to remember their pencil, or "play chess in a hurricane."   It would be a tragic irony if the legacy of this legislation is that we only increased the system's resolve to label "those kids" and did not attempt to look at the function of their behavior and how to truly help them find a better way of meeting their needs.

Steve Dahl