Student expectations and their behaviour

I am now officially a part of the twitter crowd.  So far only as a follower trying to figure out all of the things that our students do without thinking.  In one of the first posts I read, by our own vice-principal, I found a fascinating quote that got me thinking about our work with students.  She was commenting on a blog post by Joe Blower (http://www.joebower.org/) and said, "how can a teacher claim to be progressive yet subscribe to a series of punishments for non-compliance".

The blog and the tweet (never thought I would write that in a sentence) raise several issues about the progressiveness of our education system.  We are certainly in a system in transition. There are those that are keen to move us forward with what research is telling us about reward and punishment and those that cling to past practices.  The challenge for us is to continue to move forward and to help those less inclined to understand the changes occurring around them.  How do we support students in a system that is standing astride the old and the new?  As Dr. Dave Hepburn said in an interview in the most recent Boulevard Magazine, "If a doctor is practicing the way they were five years ago, they may as well be practicing in a museum".

Students make mistakes.  Sometimes they repeat the mistakes over and over without changing their behaviour.  Does this mean that they should be punished, made to feel guilty, shunned from the group?  On the contrary, we need to support kids when they make mistakes and to help them learn from them, not push them further down.  Don't get me wrong, there are and need to be consequences for our actions, but there is a difference between consequence and punishment.  Our work on Restitution (www.realrestitution.com) allows us to support students when they make a mistake and allow them to return to the group strengthened rather than chastised.

This is an area that we all need to work on and move forward with to support the development of our students.  The ultimate goal that we have in mind is to have students make positive behaviour choices because it is within them to, rather than the fear of punishment.