Theorists: Main Ideas and Principal Teachings:
Discipline & management

Jacob Kounin

Main Ideas

Kounin's Principal Teachings

Rudolph Dreikurs

Main Ideas

 Principal Teachings

Haim Ginott

Main Ideas

  Principal Teachings

B. F. Skinner

Main Ideas

  Principle Teachings

Lee and Marlene Canter

Main Ideas

 Principle Teachings

Fredric Jones

Main Ideas

 Principle Teachings

Linda Albert

Main Ideas

Principle Teachings

Thomas Gordon

Main Ideas

Principle Teachings

Jane Nelson, Lynn Lott, H. Stephen Glenn

Main Ideas

Principal Teachings

William Glasser

Main Ideas

Glasser's Principle Teachings Prior to 1985

Glasser's Principle Teachings Since 1985

Richard Curwin and Allen Mendler

Main Ideas

Principle Teachings

Barbara Coloroso

Main Ideas

Principle Teachings

Alfie Kohn

Main Ideas

Principle Teachings

Kohn's Ten Key Points

  1. Work on establishing a trusting, caring relationship with your students. It is hard to work with a student to solve a problem unless the two of you already have a relationship on which to build.
  2. Work diligently toward acquiring in yourself, and developing in your students, skills of listening carefully, remaining calm, generating suggestions, and imagining someone else's point of view.
  3. When an unpleasant situation occurs, your first effort should be to diagnose what has happened and why. If you have a trusting relationship with students, you can gently ask them to speculate about why they hurt someone else's feelings, or why they keep coming late to class.
  4. To figure out what is really going on, be willing to look beyond the concrete situation. Do not immediately identify the student as the sole source of the problem while letting oneself off the hook. We should ask ourselves, or the student, or the class, what is really going on here? Can we do anything to help?
  5. Try sitting down in a friendly way and see if a plan can be made that will resolve the problem.
  6. Maximize student involvement in decision-making and problem-resolution. Individual students should be asked:
  7. What do you think we can do to solve this problem? Involving students is far more likely to lead to a meaningful, lasting solution than having the teacher decide unilaterally what must be done.
  8. Work with students on coming up with authentic solutions to problems. This requires not easy responses but an open-ended exploration of possibilities and reflection on motive.
  9. When students do something cruel, our first priority is to help them understand that what they did is wrong, and why it is wrong, to deter it from happening again. Then, an examination should be made of ways to make restitution or reparation, such as trying to restore, replace, repair, clean up, or apologize.
  10. Making amends is important and should be viewed as an essential part of the process, but more importantly, students must construct meaning for themselves around concepts of fairness and responsibility, just as they would around concepts in mathematics and literature.
  11. When new plans ore strategies are put into effect, be sure to review them later to see how they have worked.
  12. Remain flexible and use judgment concerning when you need to talk with a student about a problem.
  13. Sometimes it is better to delay the talk for a while so that student will feel more inclined to discuss it.
  14. On the rare occasions when you must use control, do so in a way that minimizes its punitive impact.
  15. Sometimes, despite your every effort, you will have to control misbehavior. A student may be disrupting the class, despite repeated requests not to do so. In that case you may have to isolate the student or send him or her from the room. But even then your tone should be warm and regretful and you should express confidence that the two of you will eventually solve the problem together.

C. M. Charles

Tasks Involved in Implementing Helpful Discipline

  1. Examine concepts you hold about discipline. Remove erroneous or counterproductive concepts and replace them with productive ones.
  2. Familiarize yourself with the seven fundamental human needs and their associated surface needs and behaviors. Learn how needs influence behavior and can be used to advantage.
  3. Identify you own basic needs and make sure your teaching and discipline systems are consistent with them.
  4. Adjust your curriculum and instruction to maximize their compatibility with human needs and the goals of education.
  5. Present yourself attractively to your students. Be interesting, enthusiastic, kind, caring and helpful. how your charisma.
  6. Learn what is meant by teacher-student collaboration, understand how it affects teaching, learning and discipline, and determine how you will use it in your classes.
  7. Learn what is meant by misbehavior, recognize the types of misbehavior that normally occur in the classroom, and identify the factors that cause misbehavior.
  8. Learn to remove, deactivate, or ameliorate the causes of misbehavior that originate in individuals or groups.
  9. Learn to address causes of misbehavior that originate in instructional environments and school personnel.
  10. Learn how to prevent misbehavior, support student self-control, and correct misbehavior in a positive manner.
  11. Learn what is meant by class character, the effects it has on learning and behavior, and how it can be strengthened.
  12. Learn how communication and human relations can be used to improve the overall quality of your class.

William Watson Purkey

Invitational discipline (1978)  includes:

  1. Optimism: views individuals as able, valuable, and capable of self-development.
  2. Intentionality: maintains that an intentional pattern of individual behavior based on publicly affirmed ideals is the foundation for respect and trust, both for oneself and others.
  3. Respect: appreciates the rich complexity and unique value of each person.
  4. Trust: Recognizes the importance of human interdependence which generates patterns of actions represented by openness and involvement.

Dr. Robert Sweetland's notes
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