Discipline and self-discipline are different.
Before I get too much into the concept of discipline and self-discipline, I'm going to say two things that fly in the face of what most administrators proselytize.
First, we can’t’ expect kids to reflect high levels of self-discipline all the time.
The act of growing up and maturing involves testing boundaries, finding out what's funny and what isn't, finding out what procrastination leads to, or finding out what happens if you put your hands on another kid.
Kids are not perfect primarily because they are experiencing life for the first time.
Adults, on the other hand, have had the opportunity to grow, observe, modify, and develop a series of habits and behaviors that allow them to function positively in their world.
As music teachers, we have to give kids the guidance to find discipline and self-discipline while allowing them to make some mistakes. How measured we react to those mistakes is what will determine often determine if they repeatedly revisit those old mistakes and turn them into ingrained habits.
Second, all kids in your room need to be directly facing you, especially when you are talking and presenting information – no cluster of desks where kids are looking at each other and some kids have their backs or sides to you.
Now to the topic:
Self-discipline grows out of the ability to listen and intack aural and visual information accurately.
Self-discipline is primarily a collection of positive habits that enable use to function at our peak performance.
Discipline is what a teacher does with children in preparation to understanding the concepts, habits, and techniques of self-discipline.
Discipline rarely achieves its goal when applied as children are doing the wrong thing. Discipline is most effective when identified, approached, and encouraged when children are doing the right thing.
Teachers who discipline children when they're misbehaving or doing the wrong thing have missed the boat.
Disciplining a child in the act or after the act of misbehaving is never as effective as approaching the concept while a child is positively functioning in their world when they're calm.
I know many traditional elementary educators will not think that the following story might not apply to them but I think the theories behind it is applicable to almost any educational institution from kindergarten to grad school.
There was a time when I worked at the school with kids with severe learning disabilities.
With many children who had negative behaviors, when they were in the throws of a negative behavior episode, they quickly forgot what they looked like when they were performing and functioning in a positive way.
I developed a strategy for situations like this.
I would take pictures of the child sitting calmly at a desk, maybe strumming a guitar, playing a game with a classmate, maybe appropriately throwing their trash away after lunch, essentially doing the things that good students do. I would try to include a smiling peer or paraprofessional in the background.
I then took those pictures, printed large versions of them on 8.5x11 paper them, and put them in a three-ring binder.
The cover of the binder was a big glowing picture of the child with a smiling beaming face as well as their name in big letters.
When negative behaviors would start to crop up, I would take the book out and say, “Let's look at our book”.
Kids like looking at pictures of themselves.
We would start flipping the pages with me narration all the good things they were doing in the pictures.
Just the idea or the act of looking at pictures of themselves doing well had a way of calming them down and reminding them of what the expectations at school were.
I hope you can see in the story how I value reminding children how good they can be before they start to slip into bad behaviors.
Sometimes a visual prompt is what will work best with kids. Sometimes it can be as simple as understanding how often you need to prompt yourself as a teacher to give positive reinforcements to a child or a class.
Some kids need positive reinforcers more often than others. One size does not fit all.
With any child that I knew had behavior problems, I would always find a time during a break in the class or maybe at the lunch table, maybe at recess, where I would strike up a conversation about how something they did in music class not only met but exceeded my expectations.
It didn't have to be a big thing.
It could be very small and what for many kids would seem inconsequential, but for this child, maybe it was a real stretch that needed to be recognized and praised.
The conversation would always go to a place where I would say something like “Why can't we be like this all the time? Remember that time you lost it in music? That’s not like you right now. Why did that happen? Why do we have to slip up and misbehave when we know we can be so good and have people smiling at you?
When a teacher employs pre-emptive positive reinforcing behaviors, the results are always going to meet more powerful than any punishment after the fact.
A teacher’s compliment, observation, or positive reinforcer carries even more weight when the saccharine is removed and the complement or statement is delivered in a more dry, perfunctory manner.
Occasionally, when I had a class that was really cruising in high gear and performing at an incredibly positive level, I would come back from a break and slam the magnet saying it was now “Stop time” so hard on the chalkboard that it would startle them.
I'd spin around, glair at them, and not say but pointedly yell, “Why can't other classes be as good as you?”
The silence was met with deer in headlight stunned appreciation from the kids.
I would then bark, “I want an answer. How come you guys are so good?”
Eventually, some kid would raise their hand and say something to the effect of, “Well, I guess we're just good”.
I would always repeat the answer slowly and follow up softly with, “Yeah, that sounds just about right. I think you nailed it.”
All this is to say that discipline is done preemptively and in crucial preparation to self-discipline.
It's as if it's an inoculation to help your students not come down with a bad case of the “bad behaviors”.
We'll take a look at the differences between discipline and self-discipline in “Stacking Skills: Discipline and Self-discipline - Part One”.
Before I get too much into the concept of discipline and self-discipline, I'm going to say two things that fly in the face of what most administrators proselytize.
First, we can’t’ expect kids to reflect high levels of self-discipline all the time.
The act of growing up and maturing involves testing boundaries, finding out what's funny and what isn't, finding out what procrastination leads to, or finding out what happens if you put your hands on another kid.
Kids are not perfect primarily because they are experiencing life for the first time.
Adults, on the other hand, have had the opportunity to grow, observe, modify, and develop a series of habits and behaviors that allow them to function positively in their world.
As music teachers, we have to give kids the guidance to find discipline and self-discipline while allowing them to make some mistakes. How measured we react to those mistakes is what will determine often determine if they repeatedly revisit those old mistakes and turn them into ingrained habits.
Second, all kids in your room need to be directly facing you, especially when you are talking and presenting information – no cluster of desks where kids are looking at each other and some kids have their backs or sides to you.
Now to the topic:
Self-discipline grows out of the ability to listen and intack aural and visual information accurately.
Self-discipline is primarily a collection of positive habits that enable use to function at our peak performance.
Discipline is what a teacher does with children in preparation to understanding the concepts, habits, and techniques of self-discipline.
Discipline rarely achieves its goal when applied as children are doing the wrong thing. Discipline is most effective when identified, approached, and encouraged when children are doing the right thing.
Teachers who discipline children when they're misbehaving or doing the wrong thing have missed the boat.
Disciplining a child in the act or after the act of misbehaving is never as effective as approaching the concept while a child is positively functioning in their world when they're calm.
I know many traditional elementary educators will not think that the following story might not apply to them but I think the theories behind it is applicable to almost any educational institution from kindergarten to grad school.
There was a time when I worked at the school with kids with severe learning disabilities.
With many children who had negative behaviors, when they were in the throws of a negative behavior episode, they quickly forgot what they looked like when they were performing and functioning in a positive way.
I developed a strategy for situations like this.
I would take pictures of the child sitting calmly at a desk, maybe strumming a guitar, playing a game with a classmate, maybe appropriately throwing their trash away after lunch, essentially doing the things that good students do. I would try to include a smiling peer or paraprofessional in the background.
I then took those pictures, printed large versions of them on 8.5x11 paper them, and put them in a three-ring binder.
The cover of the binder was a big glowing picture of the child with a smiling beaming face as well as their name in big letters.
When negative behaviors would start to crop up, I would take the book out and say, “Let's look at our book”.
Kids like looking at pictures of themselves.
We would start flipping the pages with me narration all the good things they were doing in the pictures.
Just the idea or the act of looking at pictures of themselves doing well had a way of calming them down and reminding them of what the expectations at school were.
I hope you can see in the story how I value reminding children how good they can be before they start to slip into bad behaviors.
Sometimes a visual prompt is what will work best with kids. Sometimes it can be as simple as understanding how often you need to prompt yourself as a teacher to give positive reinforcements to a child or a class.
Some kids need positive reinforcers more often than others. One size does not fit all.
With any child that I knew had behavior problems, I would always find a time during a break in the class or maybe at the lunch table, maybe at recess, where I would strike up a conversation about how something they did in music class not only met but exceeded my expectations.
It didn't have to be a big thing.
It could be very small and what for many kids would seem inconsequential, but for this child, maybe it was a real stretch that needed to be recognized and praised.
The conversation would always go to a place where I would say something like “Why can't we be like this all the time? Remember that time you lost it in music? That’s not like you right now. Why did that happen? Why do we have to slip up and misbehave when we know we can be so good and have people smiling at you?
When a teacher employs pre-emptive positive reinforcing behaviors, the results are always going to meet more powerful than any punishment after the fact.
A teacher’s compliment, observation, or positive reinforcer carries even more weight when the saccharine is removed and the complement or statement is delivered in a more dry, perfunctory manner.
Occasionally, when I had a class that was really cruising in high gear and performing at an incredibly positive level, I would come back from a break and slam the magnet saying it was now “Stop time” so hard on the chalkboard that it would startle them.
I'd spin around, glair at them, and not say but pointedly yell, “Why can't other classes be as good as you?”
The silence was met with deer in headlight stunned appreciation from the kids.
I would then bark, “I want an answer. How come you guys are so good?”
Eventually, some kid would raise their hand and say something to the effect of, “Well, I guess we're just good”.
I would always repeat the answer slowly and follow up softly with, “Yeah, that sounds just about right. I think you nailed it.”
All this is to say that discipline is done preemptively and in crucial preparation to self-discipline.
It's as if it's an inoculation to help your students not come down with a bad case of the “bad behaviors”.
We'll take a look at the differences between discipline and self-discipline in “Stacking Skills: Discipline and Self-discipline - Part One”.
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