by Liz Ullrich and Owen Webb
We want to acknowledge this from the beginning: teaching is a challenging profession. A recent survey stated that the number one concern of teachers was student behavior and discipline (Veney et al. 4). Students today are coming to school with the highest ever rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide (Desautels, Intentional Neuroplasticity 12). For educators, teaching within a context where behavior is a daily concern results in anxiety, burnout, departure from the profession, and ultimately a lack of support for our students and schools. When our capacity as educators is reduced, we turn to classroom strategies that rely on control and compliance. Indeed, Selwyn (64) posits that schools are places where students are coerced into behaving in certain ways. We hear and see many individuals state that the cause of poor student behavior is a lack of punishment or “discipline.” This narrative implies that if we simply “disciplined” more, the behaviors we see in students would disappear. Wachtel and McCold (1) describe this as the school version of tough-on-crime, surmising that we fall into a punitive-permissive continuum. This narrative states that if we are not punishing, then we are permitting students to get away with their behaviors. This continuum reduces the responses of educators to two student outcomes: either students comply and “get in line” or we remove them from the classroom and potentially remove them from school. “How we view discipline is personal and often is intimately connected to our values that have formed from the practiced thoughts we have activated repeatedly,” writes Desautels (Intentional Neuroplasticity 273).
For educators, teaching within a context where behavior is a daily concern results in anxiety, burnout, departure from the profession, and ultimately a lack of support for our students and schools
In this article, we want to reclaim what it means to discipline. Hudson (qtd. in Webb 16) articulates that the word discipline is rooted in the Latin word disculpus, meaning “to teach.” Hudson expresses that discipline has to be viewed as discipleship, whereby it transitions from punishment and compliance to focussing on community and relationships. Hudson conveys that discipline in the community and relational paradigm is rooted in social responsibility, creating a learning environment centered on student success rather than student compliance. Desautels states:
Discipline, unlike punishment, is proactive and begins before there are problems or challenges. It means seeing conflict as an opportunity to problem solve. Discipline provides guidance, focuses on prevention, enhances communication, models respect, and embraces natural consequences. It teaches fairness, responsibility, life skills, and problem solving. (Connections Over Compliance 63)
Second Corinthians 5:14 states, “For Christ’s love compels us.” As we discipline, or teach, our students, we are shifting away from external motivators of compliance and control toward internal and intrinsic motivation. Responses to behavior are based on building or restoring relationships and compelled by love rather than seeking change through punishment. We desire to create environments where students make choices that honor their educators, their peers, and themselves. Ultimately, we want to lead our students to engage in learning that isn’t immersed in fear but rather centered in hope.
Behaviorism
Howard (qtd. in Brummer and Thorsborne) explains how responses to behavior and conflict, specifically in schools, have been centered around compliance and control: “The challenge for trauma aware education is that the bulk of the more common approaches to ‘behavior management’ in schools is mostly informed by Behaviorism and is not informed enough by neuroscience” (33). Behaviorism assumes that behavior is a matter of motivation and that what you reinforce will likely increase or reduce a behavior. We have heard teachers express, “He knows better, he is just choosing to behave this way,” assuming that students, and ourselves, are always in control of our behavior. Therefore, educators use rewards and punishments to demand compliance and control as classroom management strategies. The problem is that rewards and punishments often are ineffective with the students that struggle with ongoing behavior (Kohn qtd. in Brummer and Thorsborne 34). Kohn (50–62) explains that rewards are a form of punishment that ruptures and warps relationships, as the teacher controls the ultimate outcome, ignores reasons behind student behavior, discourages risk-taking, and changes how students feel about what they do due to the motivation behind the outcome. Rewards and punishments fail to take into consideration the role our brain plays in our behavior, reducing the likelihood of developing problem-solving skills, internal motivation, and emotional regulation. Kohn likewise shares that the effects of rewards wane over time (37).
The problem is that rewards and punishments often are ineffective with the students that struggle with ongoing behavior.
When we shift to consider behavior from the perspective of the role of the brain, we also shift from viewing what is explicitly seen (one’s actions), to what is unseen (the brain’s response). “Behaviorism privileges shaping behavior above understanding behavior. It sees behavior as a whole picture rather than an expression of unmet needs” (Kennedy xi). A central tenet of behaviorism is that educators are waiting for students to change. When they don’t change, further discipline or punishment is used, in the belief that eventually the student will move. (Think of the scene in the movie The Breakfast Club: “You just bought yourself another Saturday.” . . . “Ooh, I’m crushed.” . . . “You just bought yourself one more!”).
We know that educators desire genuine and lasting change in their students. Desautels challenges educators to shift from a model of behavior management to behavior engagement (Connections Over Compliance 59). In behavior engagement, we use moments of behavior to walk with our students, leading them to experience discipline as teaching at all moments, specifically when they are struggling with behavior. This is a just response, fulfilling Scripture’s call to us: “This is what the LORD Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another’” (Zech. 7:9).
Safety and Relationship
How do we make the shift from a more “traditional behaviorism” approach of teaching and learning to one rooted in the true meaning of discipline, where we “view discipline not as something we do to another, but rather as something we want to create within another” (Desautels, Intentional Neuroplasticity 27)? This shift requires us to understand how our brains are neurologically wired for learning and safety. According to Desautels, “To access the frontal cortex of the brain where learning, attention, working memory, and emotional regulation occur, human beings require conditions of felt safety and a sense of belonging” Intentional Neuroplasticity 26). Understanding how we process information is essential in the context of learning and classrooms because our behavior is a result of how safe our limbic system—the safety center of our brain—feels in the moment.
Our brains prioritize safety and relationship.
A helpful way to think of the limbic system is as a smoke detector. Its job is to detect smoke, but it can’t tell the difference between burnt toast and a burning house. Our limbic system is always monitoring our environment for threats, and it has two “look fors”: “Am I safe?” and “Am I welcome?” Our brains prioritize safety and relationship. A seasoned teacher would say that they work hard to create a classroom that is safe and welcoming, and indeed, this may be the case. Feeling safe and welcome is not only determined by the environment we create in a classroom, but also by whether an individual student “feels safe” there. We need to also define and understand “feeling safe”: the belief that one will not be punished or shamed for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes (Edmonson and Mortensen). Reitz (212) declares that organizations must be more than safe, they must be “safe to.” “Safe to” takes place in the context of classroom relationships between the student, their educators, and their peers. To feel safe means students must feel safe in their actions: safe to engage in conversations, safe to share ideas, safe to ask questions, and safe to make mistakes.
In a classroom, stress is the natural result of the brain feeling unsafe. As stress increases, the brain engages protective responses—behaviors—in the form of fright, flight, fight, and fawn. The more often the brain experiences heightened stress, the more habitual and patterned behavior becomes. A stressed brain struggles to learn because, as our stress increases, we lose access to the thinking part of our brain. Behavior is the brain’s way of communicating that it has passed its ability to cope with the situation it finds itself in and can no longer make rational decisions.
The challenge as educators is to be able to see behavior as a stress response in the moment, to pause and ask ourselves, “What is getting in the way of this student meeting my expectations right now?” This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to the print or digital edition of Christian Educators Journal.
Works Cited
Brummer, Joe, and Margaret Thorsborne. Becoming a Trauma-Informed Restorative Educator: Practical Skills to Change Culture and Behavior. Jessica Kingsley, 2024.
Desautels, Lori L. Connections Over Compliance: Rewiring Our Perceptions of Discipline. Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2021.
Desautels, Lori L. Intentional Neuroplasticity: Moving Our Nervous Systems and Educational System toward Post-traumatic Growth. Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2023.
Edmondson, Amy C., and Mark Mortensen. “What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace.” Harvard Business Review, vol. 3, no. 109, 2021, pp. 1–8.
Greene, Ross W. Lost & Found: Unlocking Collaboration and Compassion to Help Our Most Vulnerable, Misunderstood Students and All the Rest. 2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 2021.
Kennedy, Becky. Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be. HarperCollins, 2022.
Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. 25th anniv. ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2018.
Reitz, Megan. Dialogue in Organizations: Developing Relational Leadership. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.
Selwyn, Neil. “The Modern Classroom Chair: Exploring the ‘Coercive’ Design of Contemporary Schooling.” Power and Education, vol. 16, no. 1, 2024, pp. 63–77.
Shanker, Stuart, and Susan Hopkins. Self-Reg Schools: A Handbook for Educators. Pearson Canada, 2020.
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Listen to Your Teacher! An Analysis of Teacher Sentiment on the State of Public Education.” August 2023, publiccharters.org/news/listen-to-your-teacher/.
Wachtel, Ted, and Paul McCold. Restorative Justice in Everyday Life: Beyond the Formal Ritual. Piper’s Press, 1999.
Webb, Owen D. Student Perceptions of Discretion in Discipline: Seeking Resolution and Restoration in a Punitive Culture. Master’s Thesis, Brock University, 2009.
Liz Ullrich has been working in education as an occupational therapist for over thirty years. As a non-violent crisis intervention instructor, she has witnessed an ever-increasing shift in classroom behavior, leading her to see a connection between stress, brain function, and learning. She provides training to schools as a learning leader for the Society of Christian Schools of BC.
Owen Webb has served as an educator for the past twenty-two years and is the director of learning at Pacific Christian School in Victoria, BC. Owen completed his PhD in 2018 in educational leadership, focusing on restorative practices as a means for supporting students and educators and developing school culture.