How can I teach discipline (and pursue it myself) in a manner that responds to individual needs but functions in the best interests of a broader community?
A conversation with Dr. Jacqueline Nesi challenges me to rethink what discipline has and could mean to me, my students, and American society.
I'm starting to rethink discipline.
Everyone seems to talk about discipline in January: we go thirty days without eating sugar, without drinking alcohol; we commit to our reading pace of one book per week, our writing pace of one hour each day. Common wisdom says that discipline is a personal choice and a personal responsibility. Yes, and.
I didn’t start to think about how much we, and I, oversimplify discipline just because of the New Year: a series of conversations with students, their parents, colleagues at work, and friends over the past few months has pulled me back to the term. Almost everyone I know seems to want to be more disciplined. Still-growing, still-learning teenagers feel that desire more strongly, largely because they feel everything more. I had several tearful or frustrated conversations with students this fall who understood that, with school "back to normal," they really lacked the discipline to handle the workload commensurate with their grade levels. It was fair to feel this way; they'd been unceremoniously ushered to the next year of school without having built the content, skill understanding, habits, and strategy required to succeed in it.
People always talk about how they want to be more disciplined, but I’d never heard someone tell me that they "don't know how to be disciplined" before. What became clear to me this fall, through the experience of pandemic teens, is that discipline, one of the greatest losses of pandemic learning, is also an imperative discipline of mind for student recovery in the wake of a pandemic. Students need discipline more than ever, and it’s in shorter supply than ever.
What I, and others, usually say is: “You just have to put away distractions and get it done.” I don’t think that response, which treats discipline as a simple individual choice, is good enough. In a recent interview around student mental health and attitudes toward technology, Dr. Jacqueline Nesi reminded me that, when we think about our students and ourselves, adults are tempted to say that a lack of discipline comes from "the phone." Her research into social media and smartphone use reveals, though, that there are no simple or causal relationships between time spent using these technologies and the ability to build focus, perseverance, or achievement. Says Nesi: "...the effects of digital technology depend on the individual person using it. We need to think about, for a given teen, what are they bringing into their interactions online and how can we support them individually to use social media in ways that are healthier." This principle applies more broadly for anyone working to manage distraction and build discipline.
How helpful is it, really, to try out the kind of simple advice about discipline that, ironically, populates social media feeds at this time of year? What parents say to their kids, and what I'm guilty of saying to them, too, sounds something like this: "just turn off your phone and go into another room and put your nose to the grindstone." For a previous generation, it was television or long talks on the family's single phone line that kept noses away from grindstones. There will always be some quick and easy target for our ire when discipline is in question, some perceived obstacle that could fix the problem if we only had the willpower. What Dr. Nesi, and my students, have brought to light for me is that those targets and quick tricks aren't useful for anyone, and in fact inhibit kids (and adults!) from building a lasting discipline. All they really ensure is that most people operate, on some level, from a place of personal guilt, rather than a place of dignity. In this way, it reflects a broader social trend that moralizes a person’s ability to “just do it,” when one’s ability to “just do it” is never that simple.
Now I’m asking: How can I teach discipline (and pursue it myself) in a manner that responds to individual needs but functions in the best interests of a broader community?
Though I was raised to value discipline and am one of the more disciplined people that I know, as an educator I've long thought of discipline as a bit of a dirty word. Usually, I see administrators and teachers obsess over particular disciplines -- a student's ability to show up on time for class, behave in a particular way, turn in every assignment on time -- and notice how overvaluing those disciplines distracts students from the more difficult skills, like critical thinking or effective communication, that schools ultimately must teach. As Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity successfully outlines, a fixation on traditional stopgaps in the name of developing "discipline" invites bias toward students with stability in their lives and punishes students in unstable environments, thereby building barriers to success for those who are already down and perpetuating cycles of social class and inequality. What I'm realizing now is that, just like the discipline people who think putting phones in lockboxes helps to build discipline, by rejecting the value of discipline, I'm also been oversimplifying: I'm assuming that the development of discipline is an entirely personal choice, and that working to develop it will only damage a school community. I’ve operated from the “get rid of it” approach because I haven’t been willing to rethink what it would mean to teach discipline better. I'm seeing now, though, that I need to teach students how to have discipline. I just don't want to teach discipline by punishing students’ failure to sustain it.
In guiding the students I work with toward this discipline that they crave, I see, more than I used to, how grading metrics or behavioral metrics that we're using and incorporating into schools actually can be incredibly useful. Like many parts of life, they've just become biased and problematic because they've been twisted and misused. For example, an obsession with punctuality -- being on time for a class, turning in work on a due date -- is basically always problematic in schools, because it often puts a numerical value that determines a student's future (at least in some ways) onto a part of life that is quite often not in a student's control. Certainly there are plenty of kids who take advantage of teachers, turn assignments in late because they're apathetic. More often than not, though, it's because there are major events in their life that they're not equipped to cope with and aren't having help coping with. Honestly, even if a kid is not turning in assignments with any regularity because they're completely apathetic -- shouldn't our response be something more than just a means of articulating that they have a problem? Especially, shouldn't it be more than just a means of negatively impacting their future? I'm usually not in the camp of people who put skills like timely arrival and submission at the center of schools. I don't believe in including them in academic grades that go on transcripts. I also believe, though, that as an educator, my job is to help students unlock mastery and growth, and for many students, especially right now, discipline is a key part of that growth.
When we take issue with discipline in schools, we're taking issue with the fact that a specific kind of discipline, determined by a small set of people, dictates a student's ability to succeed. For this reason, progressive educators want to shift focus away from discipline and instead reform a system that places unequal and often inequitable value on specific forms of discipline, and that process often devalues what educators value most. I like that my students want to learn discipline, but I don't like the reasons why they want to learn discipline, because those reasons aren’t personally meaningful to sustain long-term discipline and mental health. My students want to learn discipline largely so they can satisfy the expectations of teachers, parents, or coaches; I want them to learn discipline out of responsibility to themselves. To lean into modern political terms, I suppose I’m looking to radically reform discipline systems in schools, but I’m not looking to abolish them.
Even considering discipline of this kind – discipline that prioritizes lasting student growth on a personal level in place of discipline that prioritizes pleasing and satisfying others – is a privilege. Many students and adults develop and sustain rigorous discipline out of necessity and survival skills. However, I would suggest that working to develop such discipline within communities and populations in which a majority is trying (and mostly failing) to build discipline – this is a large and diverse swath of communities in the United States – can promote a stronger, more prosocial atmosphere by helping members of that community to work from a place of healthy self-worth.
One version of myself hesitates at the statement I just made. Making discipline a matter of focusing on oneself seems selfish. I would hope discipline would lead to positive social outcomes and mutual responsibility, or the desire to do good in the world. The heart of discipline is accountability, and for most of our lives, we are inherently (and importantly) accountable to others; discipline systems that focus on extrinsic motivators play to that accountability. Realistically, though, is that the pursuit of external validation – the approval and acceptance of others – still begins with the self. It begins with a sense of anxiety and need to pursue approval. We develop discipline in order to pursue self-improvement. In my mind, the best chance we have for that self-improvement to manifest in positive externalities is for it to find its source in strong core values – dignity, self-respect, universal human value, the desire for health – than if it finds its source in the pursuit of social approval. This is an intervention that could radically interrupt the anxiety crisis we face, both in schools and beyond.
This is what it looks like when a school (or any institution, for that matter) centers and incentivizes only or mostly accountability to others:
A student has a lab report due tomorrow. It is 8 pm; she just got home from basketball practice, showered, and ate family dinner.
She knows that if she stays up into the night and sleeps in, she risks being marked “late” to school, and too many lates can both reduce her grades in class and reflect negatively on her transcript.
She also knows that if she submits the lab report late, her work will be marked down one grade for every 24 hours it is late.
At this point, the student knows that she should have started the work earlier, to avoid this predicament. She already feels bad about her lack of discipline.
Knowing that she needs to meet the expectations of school, she faces a choice: risk not meeting her teacher’s expectations or risk not meeting the school’s expectation. Either way, she’s focused now on avoiding punishment, and she’s thinking about her failure and insufficiency as a student.
Whatever she chooses, she might learn, but she’s been pushed to focus on extrinsic motivators, even if a part of her has a passion for Biology. Whatever work her teacher has done to inspire her to care about her work is gone, and the discipline feels like a chore: she’s been her before and she’ll be here again.
This is what it looks like a school (or institution) centers accountability to oneself as the first step in sustaining accountability to others:
A student has a lab report due tomorrow. It is 8 pm; she just got home from basketball practice, showered, and ate family dinner.
She knows that if she stays up into the night and sleeps in, she risks being marked “late,” and she will answer to an advisor, teacher, or administrator who will take up her time to talk through why she’s struggling to manage her time. That’s an annoying and time-sucking conversation, but it might also be helpful.
She also knows that if she submits the lab report late, her teacher will approach her about it and ask what they can do to help her create good quality work.
At this point, the student knows that she should have started the work earlier, to avoid this predicament. She already feels bad about her lack of discipline.
Knowing that she needs to complete the work eventually, she chooses to at least begin, because she wants to be able to move on to the next level of learning and understanding. Knowing that she won’t be explicitly and immediately punished, she can identify where to begin and get at least some of the words onto the page.
She can feel more free to be curious about or really puzzle through her ideas, because she knows that that explanation will satisfy her teacher. Though she’s concerned that the teacher will be skeptical and assume she hasn’t taken her work seriously, years of parallel experiences tell her that the people around her trust her good intentions and will work with her to make sure she accomplishes the learning that she needs to.
Over time and experience, she is able to gradually build the discipline to get going, and that discipline doesn’t rely as much on the incentive of others’ approval.
Ironically, it’s not really possible to make a spontaneous and individual choice to find discipline from a source of accountability and responsibility to oneself. To teach this discipline to others and to ourselves, we have to make a community choice focus on, affirm, and demonstrate the value of all. In so doing, we develop the ethic of care and concern for others that systems of rigid accountability have tried and failed to sustain.
A community shouldn’t just deemphasize accountability to others as the central value, but it should start here, emphasizing accountability to through belief in oneself. Realistically, it’s important to be accountable to others, and, as I’ve seen in moments during pandemic teaching, removing all such accountability ultimately tears at the fabric of a community. But I would argue that it becomes a lot easier to be accountable to others when you’re accountable to yourself. In order to be accountable to yourself, though you need to believe that you have worth – and that can be one of the most difficult lessons for me to teach my students (and myself, and my friends, and my bosses, and my friends). Though many people believe in the intrinsic worth of all people, these days, in America, it seldom feels that way. In our society, one has worth only once one has proven their worth. I know many people who seem too confident, too bellicose, too proud: many of them, at their core, are still waiting to see themselves as worthy.
The irony of this self-centered approach to discipline is that it cannot happen without a community, social group, or society promoting the absolute dignity and worth of all beings within it. We need to turn inward matters if we’re to build real and lasting discipline, but if what we find inside of us is guilt or shame for the ways we haven’t measured up, we’ll never be able to begin. This approach to discipline would force us – all of us in a society – to question from where our value derives, to upset a comfortable way of living and knowing ourselves through the approval of others, and to pursue a more tenable approach to life.
Ultimately, asking us to affirm the democratic belief we espouse requires that we abandon the simplistic idea that “discipline is a simple personal choice.” We begin to build the discipline we require by taking responsibility to affirm, centralizes, and demonstrate our shared belief in the worth of all. My ideas on discipline are still developing, but this seems like a good, rethought place to start.