Sending a Student Right Back to Class Is the Worst Thing You Can Do
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder explains why returning a referred student to the same classroom immediately undermines teachers, emboldens students, and destroys the discipline system.
Key Takeaways
- It undermines the teacher - Sending a student right back tells the teacher their judgment doesn't matter
- It emboldens the student - The student learns that being sent to the office has no real consequence
- It destroys the system - Once teachers learn that referrals lead to immediate return, they stop referring — and handle everything alone, even when they shouldn't
Transcript
If a kid gets sent to the office, don't send them right back to class.
For school administrators, this is one of the most important things for building trust with teachers, because if a teacher sends a student to the office for whatever reason, they need a break.
They are expecting that that student is going to be out of their classroom for a while, and sometimes it's not always a good reason.
Look, we're all human.
Not 100% of office referrals are legitimate.
Sometimes you just get frustrated with a kid and you need a little bit of a break.
And as an administrator, you can kind of tell if a referral is legitimate or if it's just kind of a bad day or just kind of frustrating.
But the worst thing in the world as a teacher is to send a kid out of the room and then have that kid come immediately back to class like nothing happened.
Actually, there's something worse than that.
The worst thing is when the kid gets sent to the office and then comes back with a treat, with some sort of toy.
Maybe it's a fidget or maybe they come back with a snack and they have this look on their face that says, I won.
I came out on top in this situation.
And that is just so defeating and so demoralizing.
teacher to have a kid just come right back to class if you're in a secondary school often it is not that difficult to keep a kid till the end of the period and you may end up with a couple kids in the office and you may end up with some teachers who maybe abuse that privilege and kind of send too many kids to the office that is a conversation to have absolutely but you don't start that conversation you don't start that process by sending the kid right back to class because We've got to reinforce teachers' authority and their ability to get through the lesson.
And often I'm hearing that teachers are being told, hey, before you can send a kid to the office, you've got to make this number of parent phone calls, or you've got to document this number of positive interactions, or you've got to do all these different things that honestly you cannot do during the lesson.
You don't have time to call a parent.
You don't have time to reinforce 10 times.
You don't have time to give instructions.
X number of warnings or X number of dojo points before sending a kid to the office.
The priority needs to be finishing the lesson, teaching the class, keeping everybody moving forward with their learning.
And if a student is disrupting that, there are better and worse ways to handle that.
And sending a kid to the office is not always the best way.
But if that is the way that the teacher has chosen in the moment, as administrators, we have got to back that choice.
And again, we can work on that and say, hey, here are some other strategies you can use if you're in this situation.
You don't have to just send a kid to the office because it's not always best.
Sometimes it's better to show that you can deal with that in the room.
But if a teacher has gotten to that point where they say, look, I'm done.
I can't handle this anymore.
I need help and sends a kid to the office.
We've got to back them up on that administrators.
Let me know what you think.