In my second week as a teacher, a massive 10-year-old named Carvon* walked out of my fifth-grade classroom and out of the building. He left in a huff after I’d scolded him for not being ready for a spelling test.
If you were watching a movie of what I did as he walked out, you’d see a 21-year-old teacher approximating the calm, firm tone she’d practiced in her discipline and management classes. You’d hear her inform Carvon of the consequences of his choices, her voice just beginning to rise and croak as he left. You’d see her clutch her clipboard and study it for a moment as if it held instructions for her.
When Carvon walked out, I looked within, but I couldn’t locate any reasonable responses or strategies. All thoughts had fallen from my mind, so my feet took over, carrying me out of the classroom and out of the building in a single sweep of motion.
I found Carvon at the gate of the schoolyard fence with his hand on the latch. I stood outside the door with my hand on the knob. I called out to him, “Come back inside right now.”
As he turned to face me, I pivoted toward the door to lead him back into the building. I tried to turn the knob, but my hand slipped around it. The door was locked. I could only manage a literal account of the situation: “Now we’re locked out of the building.”
“No, Miss, we’re not locked out. You’re locked out. I’m not going back in.”
This was the first of a series of events that led to Carvon’s expulsion. In the weeks that followed, I tried but couldn’t seem to figure him out. I couldn’t fathom the mind of a child so defiant that he’d leave the building without permission. Finding it difficult and perhaps a bit painful to empathize with Carvon, we labeled him “disruptive” and “intimidating”. We papered over him with suspension forms, improvement plans and final warnings until he left the building for good.
All discipline policies bear messages about who we think our students are. In my early career, I crafted and carried out policies that reflected my difficulty empathizing with my students. In this essay, I’ll unpack the messages conveyed by one such policy.
Two years after Carvon walked out of my classroom, I started work at a charter school in Texas. On our first day of professional development, we read an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point on the “Broken Windows” theory. At the time, many so-called “no excuses” charter schools in communities of color were applying this theory to school discipline, after its supposed success as a policing strategy in several major cities.
Broken windows theory holds that criminal activity is the outcome of a disordered environment. When we see a building with broken windows, we accept such vandalism as a normal part of that environment, and those windows give us tacit permission to commit crime. If police target minor crimes such as tagging property, jumping turnstiles and public drinking, then they won’t become gateways to more serious crimes.
As teachers committed to educational equity, we celebrated both the theory’s politics and its practical promise. If we recognize how environment influences behavior, we can’t as easily pathologize that behavior. We can’t as easily track students, label them, and confine them to our low expectations.
And, practically speaking, if we can reduce minor misbehaviors, the environment will be more orderly, and students will become more compliant, learn more, achieve more and so have access to choice-filled lives.
If you watched a movie of our school, you’d see students sitting up straight, hands clasped, heads swiveling to “track” each new speaker. You’d see teachers picking up stray bits of paper and our principal rubbing scuff marks out of the linoleum floor with his toe. I was excruciatingly explicit about how students were to do everything, from putting their pencils away (in the pencil groove inside their desks) to lining up for the restroom (on every other linoleum tile). I swooped in to correct each student who deviated from my expectations.
Yes, I believed that all students, regardless of their behaviors, were unique, knowledgeable, capable individuals who could achieve whatever they were willing to work for. But, once codified, our policy actually erased my students’ inner worlds from my mind, the very inner worlds we had hoped to honor by creating the policy in the first place.
The policy distracted me from my students’ distinctive personalities, knowledge, capabilities, interests and aspirations. I reduced their behaviors to features of the environment, not unlike stray bits of paper or scuff marks on the floor. I paid much more attention to the “outsides” of their behaviors — how they looked and sounded in my classroom — than to their “insides.”
Years earlier, Carvon had insisted I hear his inside experience of walking out of the school building: “No, Miss, we’re not locked out. You’re locked out. I don’t want to go back in.” His insistence stunned me, but I failed to recognize its value. In my early years as a teacher, I simply wanted to contain such misbehavior, to pull students like Carvon back into my classroom.
During this period, my approach to discipline carried three harmful messages:
Who my students are is an inconvenience. I responded to minor misbehaviors by saying, “If you can’t do it in a college classroom, an operating room, a board room, or a courtroom, then you can’t do it in my classroom.” Within this framework, I spoke on behalf of society and its institutions. My students’ job was to shape and contain who they were, while my job was to tell them how society expected them to do so.
Who my students are is irrelevant. I read misbehavior only as a gateway to more grievous misbehavior to come. I didn’t stop to consider what my students wanted either in the moment or in the long term. While I didn’t judge or shame them for their misbehavior, I also didn’t use it as a way to understand and to teach them more fully.
My students don’t know how to do anything. My response to misbehavior was so swift that students in my care didn’t have the opportunity to learn how to figure things out, mess up, and figure them out again. I told students how to organize materials, sit in desks and pay attention in class. I taught them that, to be successful, they need only repeat these behaviors throughout their lives.
I don’t have a discipline policy to recommend. If I taught today, I bet I’d find myself as attentive to detail as ever and as responsive to tiny ruptures in class norms. But, whatever I’d do, I’d do it with this conviction: when we teach, we make an argument for how we want the world to be. I want it to be one in which Carvon has a real stake, one he doesn’t want to leave. If I taught today, I’d start by asking myself, and him, why he didn’t want to come back inside.
*Name has been changed.
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