The RCEF Blog 博客

This week’s selection from the RCEF bookshelf is Positive Discipline in the Classroom: Developing Mutual Respect, Cooperation and Responsibility in your Classroom by Jane Nelsen, Lynn Lott and Stephen Glenn. With over one million copies of this book in print, Jane Nelsen has created quite a following for her positive discipline strategies. Nelsen and her colleagues have published 17 books on positive discipline strategies for parents and teachers and continue to hold workshops on their practices.

While this book does introduce the pillars of positive discipline, readers would be well-advised to look at earlier books in the series for in-depth explanations of the whole system. This book mainly focuses on conducting classroom meetings as a tool for teaching empowering life skills and encouraging a positive classroom environment. That being said, I think conducting classroom meetings at Guan Ai School would be a meaningful innovation. Let’s take a look.

According to the authors, holding classroom meetings can serve to mediate conflicts, prevent future conflicts and teach students social interest, mutual respect and cooperation. These meetings are scheduled regularly with agendas generated almost completely by the students. This works by creating a system for students to add to the agenda for the upcoming meeting. The agendas will cover a wide range of issues depending on the concerns of the students.

Once the class comes together to address the agenda items, certain guidelines need to be maintained. For instance, the process includes specific guidelines for paying and receiving compliments, using “I” statements, role-playing conflicts, brainstorming and “separate realities”. An in-depth discussion on each of these points is beyond the scope of this blog entry. The book does an excellent job expanding on each point and providing educators with ways to teach the importance of the process and practice each of the steps.

The purpose of holding the meeting is to bring together all concerned parties to develop a solution. With this in mind, the authors suggest a commitment to “nonpunitive solutions” rather than punishment. This is in line with the larger “positive discipline” theme of the series. In order for this to work, the meeting must have authority. This means, if the group decides on a solution, everyone needs to stay committed to letting it work for an agreed upon amount of time. If the problem remains unsolved or another problem arises, it returns as an agenda item. Naturally, this requires faith and discipline on the part of the teacher and the students.

Of course, none of these things will work without the students being taught about agendas, “separate realities” and “nonpunitive solutions”. This requires a large commitment on the part of the teacher as it requires forfeiting a degree of power. The authors recognize this and present the system in a way that, while ambitious, is not beyond the abilities of a competent educator. They acknowledge that students will take time to learn the process; however, they argue that giving up on it would be like giving up on arithmetic if it didn’t come easily. With this in mind, the authors have provided many lesson plans for implementing this system with questions and answers for problems that will naturally occur.

Overall, this book is valuable. It is a guidebook for implementing a system that will almost definitely change your classroom environment. I encourage my colleagues at Guan Ai to consider conducting classroom meetings. I look forward to discussing the prospect.