Positive Discipline + Positive Attitude = Successful Teaching

As teachers, we want to be the best for our students. Through the years of my teaching experience, I’ve been wondering about the ingredients that are needed in order for me to be the great teacher that I want to be. As always mentioned, a teacher: needs to have mastery of the subject matter; establishes rapport with the students; has good classroom management skills; has a sense of humor; and the like.

If we want our students to explicit good behavior, we need to be good on them. This idea coincides to the sayings “Love begets love” and “Do good unto others if you want them to do good unto you.” If the students are disciplined positively, with no prejudices and biases, goodness in them prevails no matter what wildness they have inside. Sometimes students misbehaved due to the way we approach and treat them. If we want to enforce good discipline practices, instilling responsibility with the sense of accountability.

As Kerrigan (2013) explained, for students to have a successful year in the classroom, they must understand and practice the behaviors teachers expect of them. Because teachers will want appropriate and cooperative behavior to become the norm in the classroom, think about how the students will know of these expectations and begin to adopt them. Additional procedures are needed to encourage students to complete assignments and to engage in other learning activities.  Ultimately, the goal of any accountability system is to help students develop into independent learners; thus, the procedures should give as much responsibility as possible to the students themselves, rather than having the student depends on either the teacher or their parents to see that assignments are completed. Also, one of the surest ways to communicate the expectation for student behavior is through a planned system of teaching classroom rules and procedures. The term ‘teach’ is purposely used because teachers will not communicate their expectations adequately if they only tell students about rules and procedures.

Meanwhile, Corpuz and Salandanan (2013) emphasized that the prevention of discipline problems begins with the identification of the cause of disciplinary problems. Discipline problems may stem from the poor physical condition of the classroom, from differences among students on account of their home background, personality traits, and mental abilities and teacher’s inability to motivate students for learning by their failure to relate to teaching interestingly and to related successfully to their students. There are several modes of establishing discipline or classroom control, from one that puts emphasis on discipline as a students’ responsibility to one that stresses discipline as teachers’ exclusive responsibility. The good teacher disciplinarian is prepared to deal with all sorts of students and knows which mode of establishing classroom discipline is most appropriate. The good disciplinarian makes use of acceptable and effective ways of dealing with disciplinary problems and avoids, by all means, the unacceptable ways.

Thus, discipline is part and parcel of effective and efficient teaching. Reinforcing behavior could be done easily through a positive approach. Hence, students will surely be disciplined and responsible if they are treated accordingly and as cordially as possible. This may be hard in the first place, but the fruits of it will bring immense and tremendous change in addressing students’ misconducts, misbehaviors, and misdemeanors.

References:

Kerrigan, L. (2013). Classroom management guide. School of Teacher Education. Retrieved May 24, 2014, from the World Wide Web: http://www.unco.edu/teach/crm.html

Corpuz, B. B. & Salandanan, G. G. (2013). Principles of teaching 1. Quezon City, Phl: Lorimar Publishing Inc.