THE POSITIVE DISCIPLINE MODEL

Fredric H. Jones, who is a psychologist and director of the Classroom Management Training Program in Santa Cruz, CA, is the founder of this model. Fredric H. Jones defines classroom discipline as “the business of enforcing classroom standards and building patterns of cooperation to maximize learning and minimize disruptions.”

According to Jones, to build positive classroom discipline, teachers should model appropriate behavior, and use appropriate classroom management methods.

Teachers must convey dignity and cooperation. If students feel they are respected as individuals, they will want to act with similar behaviors. Likewise, when teachers act maturely and competently, students will see them as role models after whom they pattern their own behavior.

Not only do good teachers tell students how to act, they demonstrate appropriate behavior in all their daily routines and interactions. Fredric H. Jones developed a model of classroom discipline which stressed the physical presence of the teacher.The basic assumptions of Positive Discipline Model are that children need to be controlled and that teachers can achieve this control through body language, administration, and parental support. His model is based on extensive observation of classroom teachers and student behavior.Jones believes that discipline problems occur because of mismanaging various routines and procedures in the classroom. Rules may be misunderstood. Seating arrangements may prevent easy access to students. Thus it will be difficult to monitor their behaviors.Moreoever, interactions between the teachers and the students may promote misbehavior.For Jones, several misconceptions about rules create problems for teachers such as;

Rules:

Click to see >>

For Jones, management is leadership. It is getting things done through people. The fundamentals are the same in parenting, teaching, business and industry.

How do you get people to do what you want them to do:

Correctly? On time? With a good attitude?

Jones found out that about 50% of classroom time is lost due to student misbehavior and being off task.

80% of lost time is due to talking without permission. 19% is lost to daydreaming, out of seat, making noises, etc. 1% is lost to more serious misbehavior, such as fighting.

He recommends that most of the lost time can be avoided by systematically employingseating arrangements, limit setting techniques, and responsibility training through incentives.Teachers need to arrange classroom furniture in ways that maximize their mobility and allow greater physical proximity to students. This proximity allows easy access to each student. Teachers need to put the least distance and the fewest physical barriers between themselves and their students.Some teachers believe the students should have the freedom to select their own seats in the classroom.Jones prefers to have assigned seats. Without assigned seating, the ones who want to talk or disrupt the classroom environment will sit in the back of the classroom next to their close friends.Jones believes that teachers must employ very specific, limit setting techniques.Limit setting means the actions taken by the teacher to control the student’s natural reflexes and motivate students back to work while the students are doing seatwork and the teacher is lecturing.

Limit setting techniques primarily involve the use of body language designed to convince

students that their teachers are in control.

Effective Body Language: Click to see >>

1. Eye contact2. Physical Proximity3. Body Carriage4. Facial Expression

For Jones, punishment does not solve discipline problems. Instead of punishing, teachers can promote cooperation through responsibility training which helps students to demonstrate good behavior voluntarily. Students do not cooperate without a reason. They will cooperate if good relationships are established and incentives provided.Incentives motivate students to start doing the right thing, maintain on-task behavior, and behave properly.An incentive is something the teacher can provide that students like so much that in order to get it they will work throughout the period/week/month. Incentives like stars, being dismissed first, having work displayed, grades, etc. motivate only the achievers...the others have no realistic expectation and so, no motivation.

If some students continue to misbehave after being presented with appropriate instruction, well-planned and delivered, with immediate response to off-task behavior with limit setting acts, an incentive system, and positive instructional support, then what to do?

In Jones’s words, “a back-up system is a series of responses designed to meet force with force so that the uglier the student’s behavior becomes, the deeper he or she digs his or her hole with no escape.”

It is important that the teacher plans and be prepared to use increasingly severe order--a sequence of consequences administered within the classroom and a back up system outside the classroom.

The knowledge of what to do next, if what you are doing doesn't work instills confidence that you can gain control without getting upset.

The back up system contains certain traditional sanctions to students, which are:

Warning

conference with student time out, loss of privileges being sent to the office detention conference with parent in school suspension, out of school suspension (1-day) out of school suspension (3 days), expulsion.