Cooperative Discipline
BY LINDA ALBERT
Three basic concepts to behavior:
 1. Students choose their behavior
 2. Ultimate goal of behavior is to fulfill the
psychological and emotional need to belong.
 3. Students misbehave to achieve one of four
immediate goals (covered later)
Behavior is a CHOICE!
 What is our goal?
 To have cooperative relationships in and beyond the classroom
 What is the action plan?
 INDIVIDUALIZED discipline plan specific to student’s needs
 Pinpoint and describe student’s behavior
 Identify the goal of the misbehavior
 Choose intervention technique for moment of misbehavior
 Select encouragement techniques to build self-esteem
Behavior is a CHOICE!
 No one can make someone behave a certain way.
 We need to learn how to interact with children so
they will choose to behave appropriately.
 What are some ways we can have positive
interactions with our students?
Styles of Classroom Management
 Hands-Off Style
 Permissive
 “freedom”
 No clear boundaries
 No effective teacher interventions ready at moment of
misbehavior
 Many students push the limits and make poor behavior choices
Styles of Classroom Management
 Hands-On Style
 “Because I say so”
 Making students behave
 Laying down the law and expecting obedience
 Many students make poor choices when confronted with a
hands-on style of classroom management
 They want to rebel
Styles of Classroom Management
 Hands-Joined Style
 Students are respectfully treated as important decision makers
 Participate in the design of their education
 More cooperative and achieve more academically
Behavior is the need to BELONG
 What does it mean to “belong” to a middle or high
school student? – (Think/Pair/Share)
The 3 C’s
 Capable
 Feel capable of completing tasks
 Connect
 Connect successfully with teachers and classmates
 Contribute
 Contribute to the group in a significant way
 In a classroom setting, what do these three words
have to do with discipline?
 In a classroom, how can we authentically encourage
our students?
Three Factors Affect the three C’s
 1. Quality of teacher-student relationship
 2. Strength of classroom climate for success
 3. Appropriateness of the classroom structure
The Encouragement Process
 Students misbehave less because we give them the
gift of our attention
Encouragement Affects:
 Self-esteem: healthy, resilient self-esteem helps
students achieve more academically and cause far
fewer behavior problems
 Violence Prevention: unfulfilled needs lead to anger,
frustration, and feelings of powerlessness.
 Gang Prevention: students join gangs to belong;
community must join together to encourage youth
 Inclusion: special needs students have the same need
to belong; “I can do it”
4 Goals of Misbehavior
 Attention: extra attention; center stage; constantly
distract the teacher and classmates to gain an
audience
 Power: quest for power; be the boss; show others you
can’t push them around; refuse to comply with class
rules or requests
 Revenge: lash out to get even for real or imagine
hurts; target can be teacher, students, or both
 Avoidance-of-Failure: avoid repeated failure; choose
withdrawal behaviors; hope everyone backs off and
leaves them along
Scenario 1
 Student is 15-20 minutes late and makes an
announcement as she enters the room.
Scenario 2
 Student refuses to raise hand during a discussion.
Scenario 3
 When Sally answers, Jimmy has a habit of rolling his
eyes and sometimes making a comment under his
breath.
Scenario 4
 Student constantly trips or falls when walking
around the classroom.
Your turn!
 Get into your regular groups. Create a scenario that
is centered around one of the four goals of
misbehavior. You have 5 minutes.
 We will come back as a group to discuss each other’s
scenarios.