Tweet

() Comments

Report

On 6/21/13, stressedteacher wrote:

> What are administrators reasons for not supporting teachers

> with discipline? I had several children with severe

> behavior problems last year but the principal acted like it

> was all my fault and I should be able to fix the children.

> I had one child who would arrive in the morning and start

> screaming at me as he walked in the door before he had even

> spent 5 minutes in my classroom. I also had students

> swearing at me. I certainly did not teach them those words

> so how is it my fault that their parents use these words in

> front of them? I had children who hit me and one who tried

> to throw a chair at me.

For students hitting and throwing chairs, absolute they should
have been disciplined by admin. Does your school have a clear,
written discipline policy? Ours does, it outlines consequences
for behaviors and some are teacher-initiated and others admin-
initiated. We expect teachers to try consequences in the
classroom first for minor issues (teacher-to-student
conference, time out, seat changes, etc) and to contact
parents about the issues. Of course for serious issues (your
hitting or throwing chairs examples) we do not expect the
teacher to call the parents first, that would go straight to
admin and be dealt with quickly. For something like swearing
a call home and documentation of the incidents would be
expected and then it could be handled by admin when teacher-
initiated interventions were ineffective. A while back we had
teachers develop levels of "severity" of discipline issues to
determine which should be sent immediately to admin and which
should be dealt with in the classroom first. Since this list
was generated by teachers it was very effective and has worked
well. Teacher and admin follow it and it's in writing so this
avoids the issue of admin refusing to support teachers for
those issues that are supposed to go to admin and likewise
avoids teachers sending students to admin for incidents that
are minor enough to be handled first in the classroom. (By the
way, "recurring incidents" of any kind is one of the
categories included on the list of issues sent to admin.)

Posts on this thread, including this one