Since its inception, education has had two goals: to help people become smart and to help them become good (Lickona, 1993). Put another way, schools have an innate duty to help develop intellectually capable students that have positive character. While much focus has been put on the former, much less focus has been put on the latter. Yet, both academic and character development must be at the forefront of everything we do.
One of the most prevalent opportunities where character development can flourish is in the arena of school discipline. According to Lickona (2004), no aspect of character development is more essential to creating a school of character than using discipline to promote positive character. Yet, we often use traditionally punitive approaches, that rely on control and that do not address problematic behavior, to punish rather than to teach. We do discipline to kids, instead of trying to do discipline with kids. We focus erroneously on stopping behaviors by addressing their effects instead of dealing with their underlying causes.
Restorative practices, in contrast, provides support and guidance that helps students get to the root of the problem and ensure fairness, equity, and continuous improvement (Smith et al., 2015). Additionally, a restorative approach helps in the student’s character development by ensuring that students are able to take responsibility for their actions, consider the impact of their actions on others, and have honest and open conversations about what they can do to repair any harm that has been caused. When students take these steps to address problematic behavior they are being given a unique opportunity to work on their character development.
And there will be many opportunities to use discipline as a means to promote positive character in America's schools. According to the U.S. Department of Education (2023), there are approximately 49.2 million students enrolled in the public preschool through grade 12. Additionally, the U.S Department of Education (2023) points out that about 800,000 students received one or more in-school suspensions and about 638,700 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions. These discipline cases provide unique opportunities to use restorative practices to create peace, foster a strong culture, and develop positive character.
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References
Lickona, T. (1993). The return of character education. Educational Leadership, 51(3), 6-11.
Lickona, T. (2004). Character matters: How to help our children develop good judgment, integrity, and other essential virtues. Simon & Schuster.
Smith, D., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2015). Better than carrots or sticks: Restorative practices for positive classroom management. ASCD.
U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. (2014). Civil rights data collection: Data snapshot (school discipline). https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-discipline-school-climate-report.pdf