PHILOSOPHY

    Classroom and building-wide discipline are the foundations for learning. Students do not learn in chaos.  Curriculum adoptions and instructional in-services become useless and a waste of our efforts if the classroom and school-wide environment are disorderly and poorly managed.  Classroom teachers who propagate and maintain a highly structured and orderly classroom environment know that the key to effective discipline is to take a prevention based approach.  They do this by building their classroom discipline system around the four critical components of classroom discipline. The first three components are prevention based and include establishing positive student relations with all students, teaching and enforcing clearly defined parameters of appropriate student behavior and actively monitoring students. The last component, consequences,  is implemented when the prevention approaches are ineffective. Weaknesses in a classroom discipline system can be directly traced to the ineffective implementation of at least one of the discipline components.  The same approaches that propagate effective classroom discipline must be implemented outside of the classroom, such as in the halls, on the fields, in the lunch room, on the buses and in assemblies.