Transcript for:
Discipline in Education

So one of the biggest challenges in education is in the whole area of discipline. And in my mind, Discipline is related to the biology of reward and the biology of distress. And it's interesting to me that by and large when you are criticized or when you do something wrong or when you are publicly given a consequence, shamed or disciplined or suspended or excluded from the class or from recess for some activity, it is not a positive experience, right? And so here's what we know about the brain. And it's capacity to learn when you feel distressed. It can't learn. And so the crazy, like the mind blowing crazy thing about this is that how do you think that shaming or punishing somebody is going to make it easier for that person to learn? It just, it's crazy. It does. The exact opposite of what you are theoretically trying to achieve. If you want somebody to learn something, as we've said a lot, they need to feel safe. They need to feel like they belong. You don't extrude them, you don't exclude them, you don't shame them, you don't punish them and then say now learn algebra. The basic, the fundamental. of contingency based practices yoked to learning is ridiculous contingency based programs were never intended to teach new concepts contingency based programs in animal models And then human models basically reinforce existing internalized content. In other words, stuff you've already learned. Now the good news is that there are ways that you can take advantage of the biology of the brain, take advantage of the neurobiology of reward and regulation and understand stress and distress and create environments. Where there is order, where there is accountability, where there is responsibility, all the things that we want to help people develop as children and young adults. So some of my favorite are practices that use a community engagement model like restorative justice practices or practices that take advantage of this inherently. It's a biologically powerful relational process of collaborating, like collaborative problem-solving. And so when you bring those practices into a school environment… Rather than shaming somebody and blaming and excluding, you're bringing somebody back into connection. People are their best when they're in community, when they're connected, when they feel safe, when they feel like they belong. And then they will learn. They can hear you. They can understand the consequences of the behavior. They can think about the future and go, yeah, that wouldn't work. They can reflect on the past and go, oh, that was really stupid. And that's how you change. You don't change by terrorizing somebody into a state of dysregulation where you're basically interacting with someone who's thinking at the level of a rabbit. You know rabbits are not particularly good thinkers. So The idea that some of these practices are too soft really is, I think, false. I think that that's community building. I think that that's giving people a better chance. I have seen the consequences. of the punishment system in our society. We know that those systems don't work very well, and we have a lot of evidence that when you treat people with respect, when you teach them skills, when you give them opportunities, when you treat them in a respectful, humane way, the probability that they'll be sociopathic and predatory and everything, that it all diminishes. The vast majority of crime and the vast majority of problems that... end up being disciplined about in schools are things that are related to fear, to confusion, anger, lack of skills. These are things that are easily repairable if you identify and treat the right thing, or identify and address the correct thing, as opposed to... Shame, blame, exclude, humiliate, that never ever leads to good things. Nobody who's been humiliated and shamed and degraded and marginalized ends up as a, you know, that doesn't breed compassion and goodwill and civic engagement and all this. That's what we want in a healthy society, you don't get by humiliating people. Thank you.