Discipline in Schools: Staying Restorative When the Rubber Meets the Road

Trevor Gardner
Age of Awareness
Published in
8 min readFeb 10, 2020

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It is all grey

When it comes to school discipline, very little is black and white. Grey pervades like clouds in a November sky. The sneaky and pernicious trick of punitive school discipline policies is that they make us believe that discipline can be simplified into right and wrong, victim and perpetrator, a flatland formed of rules and progressive behavior management systems where the correct response can be easily located on a chart somewhere on the wall or in the ed. code. They provide responses to student behavior that are simplistic and rigid. Consequently, they can be implemented with a consistency that makes them feel effective — or at least like there is “something being done” when a student’s actions transgress school or classroom expectations.

This black and white thinking is connected to the “either/or thinking” and “only one right way” approach of white supremacy culture outlined by Tema Okun, a culture that, because we are operating in the belly of the beast, coaxes us into a blind implementation of racist and oppressive policies producing racist and oppressive results.

The consistency of punitive practices, though it yields harmful and racist outcomes and rarely ever genuinely transforms student behavior, feels appropriate to many teachers and school staff who, understandably, want students to be held accountable for behaviors that are harmful or go against classroom or school expectations.

I get it. Work in schools, especially classroom teaching, is challenging. Really challenging. We ask students to do the impossible: sit in a desk in a classroom filled with 25 or 30 or 35 humans (or six to eight different classrooms if they are in high school) for six to seven hours straight, stay focused the entire time, don’t talk unless they are supposed to, and learn everything we throw at them.

Then we ask teachers to make the impossible possible by planning rigorous, culturally relevant, engaging lessons that differentiate for every student, integrate literacy throughout the curriculum, center student voice, and use data to guide instruction.

Myriad reasons, both inside and outside of school — and often beyond our control (and definitely beyond their control) —…

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Trevor Gardner
Age of Awareness

Trevor is a teacher/school leader focused on restorative justice and equity, and the author of Discipline Over Punishment and Leading in the Belly of the Beast.