evaluating both what they want and the total behavior that they are presently choosing. The counselor then assists clients to create a plan to either change what they wanted to something more achievable, and/or to choose behaviors that will better satisfy what they now want.
These same principles are applied to classroom discipline in the reality therapy approach. Specifically, Bassin (1978) reports that reality therapy asserts that schools and teachers need to abandon punitive manipulations and initiate positive, supportive interactions with students in order to produce a real decrease in student misbehavior. Students must feel not only that their teachers and their schools genuinely care about them, but also that teachers and the school are making efforts to help them understand what they want and/or to choose behaviors that will satisfy their needs.
Both reality therapy and its application to the educational context is based on a basic assumption about motivation. This assumption is that all human beings are born with five basic needs built into their genetic structure: survival, love, power, fun, and freedom; an assertion central to this assumption is that all of our lives we must attempt to live in a way that will best satisfy one or more of those needs (Glasser, 1989). Individuals try to control their own behavior so that they can choose to do the most need-satisfying thing at the time. Thus, children (as well as adults) will behave well if they are assisted in recognizing that good behavior is the most need-satisfying thing they can do.
According to Albert (1989), cooperative discipline's basic philosophy is that children have a strong psychological and emotional need to belong. This need influences how they respond to their environment and how they make behavioral choices. When teachers take steps to satisfy this desire to belong, disruptive and unruly classroom behavior is minimized.
In terms of its unde...