We Can't Use Natural Consequences for Violence — Exclusion Is the Only Humane Option

Consequences build self-discipline.

I have said in other videos that when a student is not behaving, when they're doing things that are just not acceptable at school, they may need some instruction in what to do, but not doing what they already know to do becomes no longer an instructional issue, and it's consequences that need to do the job of quote-unquote teaching that what that student needs to learn.

And this comment says, if you're allowing children to experience natural consequences of their actions, then they're learning and it's a skill they can develop.

And I don't really think behavior is a skill, but I do agree that it is consequences that reinforce what needs to be reinforced here.

But I think natural consequences don't actually come up that much in school.

So we have to be a little bit creative about the consequences that we put in place.

And for violence especially, we need to use exclusion for violence.

And here's why.

The natural consequence of violence is violence.

If a kid goes to the park or the playground and punches somebody...

The consequence of that is not that they get suspended from the park for three days.

The consequence of violence at the park is violence.

In most areas of life, the natural consequences of violence is retaliatory violence.

And in schools, we don't do that.

We don't allow that.

We don't allow retaliation.

Violence is prohibited by the school and the, you know, from both the school and the students.

So there has to be a different consequence that is less dangerous, that is less harmful.

And exclusion is that consequence, and it does that teaching that instruction can no longer do.

It reinforces the expectation that we don't hit, we're not violent, we don't hurt people.

And if we don't have that kind of consequence, the question I've been asking in my videos is, what do we have?

And usually the answer is nothing, or we have more instruction, which as we've seen, the student does not need.

Once they know what to do, they've been taught what to do, they have strategies, they've had those strategies modeled for them, they've practiced them, At the end of the day, if we are putting no consequences in place, then we are teaching through the lack of consequences.

And we're teaching young people that it's okay to hurt other people to get your way.

It's okay to not be in control of yourself and hurt other people just whenever you feel out of control.

And we're teaching the lesson that for both students and staff, it's acceptable to get hurt if someone else doesn't have good control of themselves.

And you should just have to kind of put up with that.

And I really feel like the lesson we need to leave students with is that harming other people is not okay.

Violence is not okay.

And exclusion is not the natural consequence of that, but the consequence that we are choosing because it is the least harmful to everybody.

And it solves the problem.

It gets people away from someone who is hurting them, at least temporarily, so we can have a bit of a reset and a boundary in place.

So let me know what you think about that.

I think not all consequences can be natural, but we've got to think about how to modify them for the school environment so they do the job.