Back in March, I wrote a piece entitled Unnatural Consequences dealing with the way schools and teachers take away things like recess and physical education as punishments or consequences for some form of misbehaviour. I did provide a few options in the post about what I deemed to be more appropriate and meaningful consequences, however, a number of kind readers asked for more – talking to you Alison from Hamilton!

So, what I did was ask a number of #physed folks to write about the consequences that they use – as well as their approach to ‘discipline’ or ‘management’ in their classes (lots of different words we could use here). My plan is to post one of these a week for a bit (I think I have 4-6 in total lined up). This first post in the Natural Consequences series is from Jo Bailey (@LovePhyEd). Please check out Jo’s blog as well!

The case of the student who punched 3 boys in the face and took another boy’s boot in order to get a pylon (not sure what that is!).

Editors note: Jo, a pylon is the little (usually) orange cone-like thingys we use to mark goals, boundaries etc. – what do you call them?)

We know he was in the wrong. He admitted, as the report said, he was in the wrong but nothing in the consequences given to this student tackled the WHY behind what happened. In this situation, a simple A,B,C protocol would probably have been much more effective.

A,B,C in this context refers to Antecedent, Behaviour, and Consequence. We know what the behaviour was, we know what the consequence was but we don’t know what happened before the behaviour: What led to this? Why did the student lash out? Had something happened in the preceding classroom time or at a previous recess? Was this student simply needing to let off a lot of steam and did so in a completely inappropriate way? Doe this student need to be taught coping strategies for dealing with frustration or communication skills to use with his peers?

Step 1 for me would be to identify the antecedent. This is not necessarily easy and the student, particularly being quite young, might not be able to articulate exactly why he felt the need to punch other students or steal their belongings.

Step 2 we already know about.

Step 3 – the consequence – is the part that needs to change. The punishment given does nothing towards teaching the student why his behaviour was not acceptable. The student has not, as far as we are aware, considered what he needs to do in order to fix this situation nor has he been given the opportunity to do so. Student ownership of how their actions affected others needs to be addressed. The consequence given does not address the victims in this scenario either: How the incident impacted them, what has been hard for them about dealing with the incident, and what they think needs to happen to make things right.

The approach described above is Restorative Practices – the student who did wrong needs to make it right again and learn how to make better decisions in the future. Restricting physical activity and denying him an academic class by removing him from Physical Education may well increase the odds of the student lashing out again.

To give an example, last year my students were learning about geocaching and we visited a park across the road from school where I had hidden geocaches. On this day a new bench was being put into the park, with fresh concrete to hold it in place. This fresh concrete was just too tempting for a few of my students who made the poor decision to write their names and add some inappropriate artwork to the concrete. I addressed it immediately and asked the students 1) who had been affected by their actions and 2)what they thought they should do to make it right. They agreed they should try to repair the damage done. Luckily, the parks department employees were still in the park and the students worked with them to repair the damage they had caused. Having to apologize to the park department staff and then realize, by doing it themselves, the hard work that the parks department staff had done was very eye opening for them. They also learnt about the whole procedure required to lay concrete for such a project. It was so much more effective than any detention or removal from class would have been and provided a complete new perspective for them.

Identify and fix the problem – don’t put a band-aid on it. It won’t stick.

Thanks Jo!

Please feel free to add your thought on ‘natural consequences’ in the comments below, or contact me to contribute a post!