Discipline management is rooted in an alternative way of thinking about school discipline policy. It advocates the establishment of a school environment that supports good student behavior and provides an organizational look at how to build good school discipline, based on actual experiences.
In essence, the philosophy of discipline management holds that punitive approaches, whether based on rewards or punishment, simply employ techniques to control student behavior which, as a result, produce little self-discipline and only short-term compliance. Accordingly, the philosophy of discipline management holds that discipline must be viewed as part of the larger learning system whose goal is to strive for long-term learning that produces mental and moral involvement.
Proponents of discipline management have stated that it has strong and lasting benefits. Indeed, Edens states that the use of discipline management can create an ideal learning environment in which coercion is absent, behavioral problems are reduced, children look forward to going to school, and students are more fully engaged in learning; moreover, Edens states that because of the positive benefits to students in terms of improved and less disruptive classroom behavior, teachers benefit in that they experience less stress. The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature on discipline management in order to determine the validity of claims of positive benefits for discipline management. The paper concludes by relating findings to youth culture.
Based on the claims of proponents of discipline management, the following hypothesis is formulated:
The existing literature will show that discipline management produces several positive benefits both to students and to their teachers.
The review of literature presented here examines several studies of the impact of discipline management. The literature can be divided into two broad categories: (1) ...