Student Reported Discipline Will Begin the Change Your School Needs

You need to hear both sides of every “disciplinary” incident and you need to hear about every disciplinary incident.

I must not write all over the walls.

A teacher gives a student a zero for not doing her homework. A student is told to stop talking in class. A teacher yells at a student for (a) running, (b) cursing, or (c) PDA in the hallway. A student is marked late for class.

All of these events are disciplinary actions. If you don’t think so, ask the kids involved. But none of these end up in your school’s discipline database. And since these aren’t in your database, you really don’t know much about discipline in your school.

We all know that any database on discipline needs to document who, what, where, when, and why. Which adults(s)? Which student(s)? What, exactly, happened? (in detail) Where in the building or out of the building? When — both clock time and school time? (Beginning of period? Third passing time? Lunch?) And if possible, why? (“He’d been picking on me for weeks.” “This was the fifth time he’d been late.” “My mom hit me this morning.”)

“At the schoolwide or universal level, office referral information generally provides a broad base of data to evaluate the success of schoolwide and secondary interventions. For example, office disciplinary referral data, when…