When Nathan Maynard started working with incarcerated young people in Tippecanoe County, Ind., in 1997, he instantly connected with the “misunderstood” kids. They reminded him of his own childhood, he said.
Maynard dealt with personal losses early in life and “drifted” briefly to criminal activity, he writes in his new book, The Science of Discipline: 8 Strategies for Empowering Educators and Engaging Students. Problems at home made him apathetic toward school.
Kids he worked with later in life, he said, “typically are quickly kicked out of school, and most of them had multiple felonies and records,” he said. “Where does society teach these kids? When do these kids get trained? It’s when they get arrested.”
“I was seeing kids that were expected to act a certain way but had never been taught to act that way.”
He chose a career in education in hopes of making a difference by working with students “upstream” of the criminal justice system, while they were still in school.
As the dean of discipline at an Indianapolis high school, Maynard helped design school discipline policies based on a consistent pattern of consequences.
“It’s not about bigger and worse consequences. Without consistency, everyone in a school will feel let down,” he said.
A consistent discipline policy can also reduce confusion when schools roll out restorative practices, which focus on repairing harm caused by a student’s behavior instead of solely punishment. It’s a model that’s become more common in schools, but doesn’t enjoy universal support among teachers, who are dealing with student behavior they say has grown worse in recent years.
Education Week spoke to Maynard about his approach to restorative practices and how schools can strike the right balance between punishment and repair.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Are restorative practices misunderstood?
Restorative practices got popular pretty quickly. When something gains this fast popularity, a lot of consultants and books come out, and it starts to blur the line over the definition. Since it was called “practices,” everyone does something different. I travel around the United States and I rarely run into two schools, even in the same state, that that define restorative practices the same way. It’s gotten messy.
A lot of people say there are no consequences. It’s because they’re not being progressive. They’re not scaling up based on the harm levels [of the student behavior].
What I’ve found based on my work is that discipline needs to be progressive, restorative, and have logical consequences.
What’s your definition of ‘progressive discipline?’
When I say the word “progressive,” I’m thinking tiered, and it grows based on the times that you do it. For example, in my school, the first time a student would get into a physical fight, we had a consequence.
Typically, that was a short, out-of-school suspension. There was conflict resolution there, and then there was some sort of repair that they would do when they came back.
If they were in a second fight, they would have another, longer out-of-school suspension, another reintegration path, another conflict resolution. But now they need to go through our aggression replacement training or anger management during their lunch period with our school counselors.
Every time a kid misbehaves, and it’s the same behavior, if you give the same consequence, you teach the student that there’s no accountability.
I think that’s what’s happening in schools. And that’s just hurting our teachers a lot.
Teachers don’t want to do consequences anymore because they don’t feel like they’re getting supported outside of the classroom. They don’t know what to do in the classroom. So, it’s sort of a broken system. Consistency would improve everything.
In your book, you write that student behavior can be motivated by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Is there an imbalance between the two?
Yes. The imbalance came from, I would say, just looking at the way we did discipline in K-12 schools across the United States: We started leaning on extrinsic motivators very heavily.
There’s got to be a healthy mix and balance.
If you lean on one side more than the other, what ends up happening is, it may not feel right or it may not match society. If you go to a Montessori school, where the motivation to behave a certain way is intrinsic, are those kids going to be successful in the workplace where they have to work a 9-to-5 job?
Likewise, on the heavily extrinsic side, there are certain schools that are very high-achieving but don’t have a lot of relationships there. Their students are struggling with anxiety, with relationships.
As an educator, on a simple level, it’s just about improving relationships in the classroom community, because kids will not even focus on the extrinsic factor if they don’t care about the relationship or that environment—unless that extrinsic factor is so fearful or so big that they have to respond to it. I do think that there’s a healthy balance, but I also think using fear as an extrinsic factor breaks a little bit of an intrinsic capacity to get [to better behavior].
If intrinsic motivation to behave is reliant upon relationships, and extrinsic motivation on fear, those things are like water and oil.
Dealing with different types of misbehavior is exhausting for teachers. How should they approach discipline?
At its core, discipline is a teaching tool. When kids are acting out, what can we teach them through the discipline process?
The way that the average teacher should think about this in the classroom is thinking through minor and major behaviors and thinking through minor and major consequences.
Minor behaviors are things that we need to hold accountable in the classroom, and all teachers need to be consistent about the consequences. If you’re a middle schooler and you’re switching between classes, and one teacher is the “cool teacher” who lets you wear the AirPods or show up late, and another teacher is the opposite, the kids are not going to respect the system. They will push back on different teachers.
It’s also important that the school administrators support the educators with progressive discipline practices outside of the classroom with major behaviors. Because what happens is, sometimes the teachers will do consequences in the classroom, and send the office a referral, but the kid comes back with a lollipop. It’s very common that administrators don’t know how to do progressive consequences after something minor turns into something major.
The teacher has had this behavior a repeated number of times, but typically, the administrators funnel this back to the teacher and say they need more data, that they need the teacher to track this 10 more times … when this teacher has been consistent with minor behaviors and the consequences in their classrooms.
You talk about teachers being behavior detectives, to figure out what’s going on with their students. Do you think they have the time?
Teachers are spending their time responding to kids’ needs. Typically, that comes out as a redirection or a consequence or a conversation with the parents. If they can adapt their time to be more of a detective, I think it makes the other time spent easier for them, because if you know why the behavior is showing, or you’re picking up on certain things with students, you can get ahead of the problem.
Let’s say you notice a student walking into your classroom and their head’s down, and normally their head is up, you can say something like, “Hey, I hope you have a good day today,” when they’re walking into your classroom.
I tell a lot of educators the easiest way to do this is to become an embodied practitioner of this work. Educators have to realize they need to focus on their own regulation and then have quick touchpoints throughout their day with their students. I think that makes a ton of difference. And hopefully this takes the exact same amount of time that teachers are already spending on redirecting behaviors, but [now] they’re just doing it in a way that improves accountability and consistency around discipline.
