Discipline with Dignity: New Challenges, New Solutions

I had the most difficult year of my 19 year career last year. I worked with Read 180 students (far below grade level in reading) in middle school, and soon found that I needed a LOT more information about working with challenging students. I read this book two time over the summer and have notes and sticky notes. If any issues arise this year, I think I will be writing the authors. However, I want to add that I ended last year very discouraged. Reading this book has given me hope and new tools.

In 20 years of teaching, and another 6 years as principal, I've ever seen a better book about classroom management and discipline. This book leads the reader to understand and live the philosophy with good classroom management and various ways to make it happen. It gives great practical suggestions without being too prescriptive and narrow. A must read for new teachers and administrators. It has saved the teaching profession for some I know

Did a week long workshop my first year of teaching and was asked to present it to my school. Have been using their ideas for years and they are very effective. I've been teaching in Saudi Arabia the last couple of years and the kids can be pretty unruly. Thanks to Discipline with Dignity, I'm proud to say that my classes are some of the best behaved in the school.

This was a really good book for making you think. We read it in a college class for math education. It spurred a lot of good conversations among the students on how to work with our future students in a way that shows respect while working to help correct misguided behavior. Hope it helps you think about those topics too.

Gold, pure gold! I wish I'd read this book before it even crossed my mind to cross the threshold of any classroom... anyhow, better late than never... I used to believe that if you took the time to make your lessons engaging, then discipline "would take care of itself"... turned out that wasn't always the case, but rather only part of the deal. Like, you know you have to set limits and boundaries, but there are ways of going about it, some better than others... This book is also great, because the authors support every strategy / advice with very specific examples and actual scripts of possible courses of interaction between teacher and student...Speaking of "teacher burnout", speaking of which...

Some of the advice in this book is excellent, and I feel I have gained a greater appreciation of the reasons student behavior is so varied and sometimes unpredictable. However, IMO there are some problems with this book. One of them is the authors' philosophy that you don't have to treat students exactly equally in order to treat them fairly. I can use myself as an example of why this philosophy is not a good idea: I was a very good student throughout my school years and followed all the rules because I saw the benefits to others and to myself in doing so -- however, if I had witnessed students reaping different consequences for the same misbehaviors (pages 86-87) no matter what the reasons for the differing treatment (barring special needs, of course), I would definitely have begun to act out and become one of the problem children, since even as a child unfairness and inequity were always hot issues for me. Another example of something I disagree with can be found on page 117, where a student's misbehavior is deliberately ignored by the teacher, as a disciplinary strategy. Ignoring behavior, even to address it outside of class later as the book instructs, simply doesn't work. In fact, ignoring misbehavior in the immediate context encourages other students to act out as well, and the problem will mushroom. I don't believe anybody can justify this particular recommendation for any reason, let alone the one the authors give. So, to sum it up, this book is a mixed bag -- some good advice and helpful in some directions, but not realistic or workable in others.

Perfectly described

I have taken several classroom management classes as well as read several different books on the subject and still have trouble in the classroom. None of the things I had done in the past felt completely right to me. This book and philosophy does. It puts the my own feelings of student responsibility into words and gives practical ideas for application of such a program in the classroom. Thank you.