Practices Associated With Effective Discipline

Abstract

This study took its genesis originally with the provocative teaching problem of discipline per petually facing old and new teachers alike. It has been the sincere conviction of the author through the years of teaching and graduate study that the problem of discipline can be met best not by authoritarian control or robot bullying, but through well-planned efficient teaching by a real human being, keenly aware of the sensitiv ities, ambitions, and foibles of those seated be fore him, able to sense the humor and pathos of their lives, and willing to make their learning j and personality growth his fundamental aim in teaching. It was decided to make this an humble exper imental study testing practices associated with effective discipline. It was decided to draw up a list of some thirty-eight observable practices with room for independent observations and match the frequency of their occurrence with the principal's rating in discipline of the teacher ob served. This last had one chief value: it estab lished the principal's rating as th? independent criterion of discipline in each case. Thus, for the purposes of this study the concept of discip line will be considered simply as the element of classroom control a principal has in mind when he answers the questions, of your tea chers have the least difficulty managing their classes? Which have the most? Once the rating chart of some thirty-eight practices was definitely formulated, (See Appen dix B)** there remained, among other things, the task of testing it in the actual classroom. To ac complish the step it was decided to observe a number of teachers, rating them on the practices listed on the chart, and then to compare these ratings of individual practices with general dis| I cipline ratings of the same teachers by their re spective principals. These ratings were to be indicated against each teacher's number, after which the principal was to destroy the key bearing each teacher's I name against the appropriate number, and re turn the rated numbers to the observer. Strict anonymity of these teachers was preserved by the use of two sheets in each school; one with the teachers' names and their keyed numbers, the other with just the numbers and blanks for the principal's ratings. The first was destroyed by the principal in each case after the second was filled out and returned to the observer. From the lists of volunteering teachers, eighty two teachers of the various academic subjects were selected for observation. Sixty-six of these teachers were willing to be observed twice. All in all, then, one hundred and fifty observations of the normal forty-minute period length were made in the six schools of the eighty-two teach ers participating.