Teacher fidelity to Conscious Discipline and children’s executive function skills

Abstract

Conscious Discipline is a social-emotional learning classroom management program that uses classroom activities and routines to teach children problem-solving skills and to foster a sense of safety in the classroom. According to the publishers of Conscious Discipline, the program is currently practiced in 47 countries and is widely implemented across the United States, including approximately 11,000 Head Start classrooms and 935 school districts (Loving Guidance Inc., 2018a). Although the increasingly popular Conscious Discipline program is based on theories of child development and neuroscience and proposes to influence children’s executive function (EF), social, and academic skills, longitudinal studies of Conscious Discipline implementation and children’s skills in these areas have not been conducted. To address this gap in the literature, we examined the association between preschool teachers’ (N = 45) fidelity to the Conscious Discipline program and students’ (N = 293) EF, social, and basic academic skills development over the course of the school year. We found that higher fidelity to the Conscious Discipline program was positively associated with preschool students’ EF and social skills development but not their basic academic skills development. Given the correlational design of this initial study, future research examining (a) the causal relations between the use of Conscious Discipline and developmental outcomes; and (b) how Conscious Discipline compares to other classroom behavior management strategies is warranted.