Are We Really Sending the Teacher to the Office When a Student Misbehaves?

If a teacher has a misbehaving student, rather than send that student to the office, why doesn't the teacher get sent to the office too?

And instead of just blaming the student for their behavior and holding them responsible, why don't we also hold the teacher responsible for the behavior?

If that sounds ridiculous to you, like it does to me, you might be surprised to learn about this co-regulation fad and this idea of nervous system repair.

And this idea that rather than have the student go to the office and talk to an administrator or talk to the guidance counselor and, you know, kind of get their behavior back on track, why don't we have another adult take over the classroom, have the teacher stop their lesson, which, right, somebody else probably can't just go ahead and teach that lesson.

The teacher needs to be there unless they've written the lesson specifically for somebody else to be able to teach it.

So instruction is stopping.

Somebody else is watching the class.

And the student and the teacher go somewhere else and talk about what happened.

And notice in these questions, I'll put these back on screen here so you can see, notice how much the teacher is blamed.

It's presumed in these questions that the behavior of the student is in some measure the teacher's fault.

And as a teacher, I would always have to, of course, take responsibility for my contribution to any situation.

Yes, we do that.

But the idea of a process that basically is mandatory gaslighting of the teacher.

Whatever happened must have been your fault to some extent, right?

If you get assaulted out on the street, it must have been what you were wearing.

The gaslighting here is just so gross to me.

that I don't think any good can come of this.

Like yes, be reflective on your practice, but making that a mandatory part of some process that teachers have to go through to get help with a misbehaving student who's disrupting class or hurting other people or whatever the issue is.

Like this idea that you should send the teacher to the office, I think is just like a perfect, picture perfect textbook case of the reversals of common sense.

that we're seeing in our profession.

So I'm curious if you're hearing this idea about nervous system repair or co-regulation or this idea of stopping the lesson and going to the office with the student.

Like, here's the thing.

Students and teachers are not the same, right?

We are not equals.

We are not on equal footing.

One person is an adult professional who is responsible for educating children.

The other one is a child and kids are going to make mistakes.

Kids are not going to be perfect all the time.

And if as adults, we are constantly blaming ourselves visibly in front of students, blaming ourselves for their mistakes.

I don't think that's healthy, right?

Like I think it's healthy to own our mistakes.

Like if I lose my temper and say something I shouldn't to my students, I think I should take responsibility for that.

But if a student is inappropriate when I'm doing my very best and doing everything appropriately as a teacher, I don't think it's appropriate for me to try to blame myself in front of the student and try to take kind of collective responsibility for that student's choices.

I think we should take responsibility for our own choices, but not blame ourselves or allow other people to blame us for our students' choices.

Let me know what you think.