No Sending Kids to the Office at All? That's a Problem
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why policies that prevent teachers from sending students to the office — even for serious disruptions — leave classrooms without necessary safety valves.
Key Takeaways
- Teachers need the option to remove disruptive students - Keeping every student in the classroom regardless of behavior undermines instruction for everyone
- Having admin sit in isn't a solution - Administrators babysitting individual students in classrooms is an inefficient use of leadership time
- The office referral exists for a reason - It provides a necessary escalation path for behaviors that can't be managed in the classroom
Transcript
Not allowed to send students out of class at all.
This was a new one to me yesterday, but I got several comments about this.
In schools that are really trying to cut down on students being sent out of class, apparently there's a practice now of having an administrator come to the class and sit with the disruptive student until they're ready to learn, instead of sending the student out of class.
And if this was a fixable problem and a viable solution to it, then that would make sense, right?
If a student is acting up in class and this is a solution that works, okay, that might make a certain amount of sense.
But here's what's really going to happen.
What's really going to happen is that it's going to happen too much for administrators to be available.
Like there just aren't going to be enough administrators to go around.
And the student is just going to be left in class with disruptive or violent behaviors, right?
The administrator is not going to be able to come and sit with all of these students at once who are acting this way.
And because there is no real consequence, the behavior is just going to continue and escalate and spread to other students.
And if a student does get an administrator to show up, well, great, now we have reinforcement.
Now we have attention.
Now we have power.
Now a kid, by acting up, can control an additional adult as well as a class full of students.
And of course, the administrator could, I guess, take the kid out of class at that point if the student is still not able to get it together once the administrator shows up.
But all this is being done in the name of keeping the kid in class under the theory that that is the way to maximize the student's learning, I guess.
Maybe there are other reasons, but this idea that, like, a student has to be in class all of the time, no exceptions, there's no situation where it's okay for a student to be sent out of the That's a hard one for me.
That's a strange belief system to me because it seems really obvious math-wise that the learning of everybody else in the class matters more than whether one student who's probably not learning anything anyway should get to stay in the room.
Just the value of keeping that kid in the room for their own learning seems extremely minimal, and the cost of keeping that kid in the room at the expense of everybody else's learning, seems just astronomical.
That's just an unacceptable price to pay to keep the kid in the classroom for a very questionable benefit.
And, you know, if this is working really well in your school, feel free to let me know.
But I just have to think there are not enough administrators to go around when this behavior is going to be contagious, right?
When we reward kids with attention and power for acting up, then we should expect more acting up, right?
One of the reasons exclusionary discipline works so well is that it takes away your audience.
It takes away...
your attention.
It takes away your power over other people when you get sent to the office and maybe ultimately sent home.
Nobody is really excited about the audience of in-school suspension or detention or lunch recess detention or whatever it is that is used as a consequence.
Nobody's really excited about having that audience.
The audience that kids want and are reinforced by when they're acting up is their gen ed classroom.
Like their regular class, that is the audience that they find rewarding to disrupt.
And the nice thing about sending a kid to the office is you deprive them of that audience.
You deprive them of that reinforcement.
So this idea that we should just keep kids in class at all costs no matter what they're doing and have an administrator come and sit with them doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
And what example does that send to everyone else if there is no real consequence other than additional attention If you do something terrible, if you destroy the classroom, if you tip over furniture, if you hurt somebody, if you're screaming obscenities at people, like kids need to see that there is a consequence for unacceptable behavior like that.
And if we're teaching them a different lesson in school that will be maladaptive to them outside of school, like you try some of those behaviors at the park, you're going to get decked.
If you try some of those behaviors at a store, you're going to get arrested.
And this idea that we can just kind of be okay with everything and just wait till they're ready to learn and never really have consequences for any kind of behavior.
This does not seem good for anybody.
It doesn't seem good for all the other students whose learning is disrupted.
And it doesn't seem good for the student who has sent this message that this behavior is okay.
We're going to reward this behavior with lots of extra attention.
Let me know what you think about this practice of just having the administrator come and sit with the kid rather than just send them to the office.