If You Don't Want Teachers Sending Students to the Office, Make Sure They Have Other Tools

Teachers need to be able to give detention or take away recess and have low-level consequences like that that don't require them to refer a student to an administrator for low-level issues.

And there's often the saying that you're giving away your power when you send a student to the office.

And I think there's something to that.

But that power needs to be provided by policy in the form of the ability to issue a consequence yourself.

If you're going to be responsible for a group of young people, you need a certain amount of authority and a certain amount of power to follow through on what you say.

And I don't know that we have ever successfully operated our profession without that.

The idea that teachers could not be able to take away recess or give detention is a kind of new and unproven idea.

And I think so many educators now are working in schools where policy has taken that away from them and there's nothing really to replace it.

And if they send a student to the office, often, you know, they don't get much support in that way.

Maybe it's kind of a low level thing.

And like to be sure, we should only be sending students to the office for things that can't be handled in the classroom.

But if we take away the tools for handling things in the classroom, what do we expect to happen?

So this idea of like giving away your power by sending students to the office, I think is pinning the blame on the wrong place right like this is a policy problem if teachers actually don't have the power to issue some consequences now if taking away recess is illegal in your state of course there are ways we can modify recess and say okay you have to stay on that part of the playground or walk laps or whatever i'm sure there is a legal way to take away recess in some form as a consequence but when policy takes away every option from teachers like other than sending students to the office or just not showing up to work anymore, like, what else is there?

What is the recourse?

And we certainly don't want people to get to the point where they're frustrated, where they lose their cool, because certainly losing your cool and showing frustration does affect how students see you, right?

Like, you want to be in control, but, like, you need a certain amount of power to be in control.

And I think, like, we've all seen, you know, if you went to school in the 80s or 90s, you probably saw some examples of people who went too far with that.

Like, I I've heard of teachers who would have a referral written out for every single student or a detention slip written out for every single student on the first day of school.

And if a student acted up, even in the slightest, they would immediately go to that student's desk, sign their detention form or their referral slip, and send them on out.

And they're like, okay, that's too much.

But you do need the ability to have some low-level consequences.

If we don't, things escalate.

Things don't get handled at a low level and they're no longer little things.

They're no longer low level things.

They blow up into big things or the adult blows up or students blow up at each other.

And I think if we want to have less disruption in school, if we want to have fewer of the big problems, we've got to give people the tools to handle the smaller problems.

And I think detention and losing recess are some of our best tools.

Let me know what you think.