The Founder of Conscious Discipline Has 1 Year of Teaching Experience
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder questions why schools adopt discipline frameworks created by people with minimal classroom experience.
Key Takeaways
- One year of teaching experience - The creator of a widely adopted discipline program has almost no firsthand classroom experience
- Credentials matter - Schools should scrutinize the background of people selling discipline approaches
- Practice-tested matters more than theory - Discipline frameworks should come from people who've actually managed classrooms long-term
Transcript
Conscious discipline.
Have you been trained on conscious discipline or does your school use it?
I did a little bit of digging today because I've been seeing this quote about how punishment doesn't work, students misbehave when they have a skill deficit and we need to teach, not punish, and like there seem to be a lot of misconceptions about how consequences work in schools.
And I've heard of conscious discipline quite a bit, but I never really looked into it.
And it turns out that conscious discipline was founded by someone who has a grand total of...
one year of teaching in kindergarten and zero years in K-12 other than that.
So no school leadership experience, only that one year of teaching.
And then it was all like grad school and higher education and government stuff after that.
And I just think we have to be careful about who we trust and what they're basing their advice on, because if it is not experience, it needs to be really good research.
And in a lot of cases, what happens is ideas catch on and take on a life of their own and people get popular and they sell books and they become popular speakers and people become afraid to push back and say, well, wait a minute, Don't you have this fundamental idea wrong here?
Like, one of the things that this meme says, and somebody sent me a link to an article that goes into a little bit more depth on this, is that punishment doesn't work.
And I thought, like, I don't like punishment.
Punishment is not what I recommend for school discipline.
But hold on.
Punishment?
doesn't work like have you ever been a parent have you ever been a teacher have you ever been a child have you ever met a child yes punishment works and there are reasons that we don't rely on punishment in schools and reasons that consequences are different from punishment and of course we have to be careful about punishment as parents and you know like there's a lot to to unpack there But the idea that punishment doesn't work, like where did you get that?
Did you not take educational psychology?
Did you not read about B.F.
Skinner?
Did you not learn about behaviorism?
We may not want to use punishment, but punishment works.
So when people say absolutely crazy things like this, like punishment doesn't work, I have to really wonder, how on earth do you know what you're talking about?
Because to me, Being a first-year teacher, teaching for one year, and then having no other experience in K-12 education does not qualify you to be one of the leading experts on how schools should be run in terms of discipline.
So I find this very strange, but let me know what your experience with conscious discipline has been.