Despite a teacher’s best efforts, there comes a time when a student’s behavior is beyond what they can manage in the classroom and they need to request help from the office. This ‘request’ is often a piece of paper that is sent with the student to the office.
Now, in my Restorative PBIS Academy I teach you how to move from a reactive punitive discipline system to restorative one, and in that course I actually recommend that you NOT send kids to the office but instead you have someone come to the door for a Restorative Chat.
But, no matter where you are as a school, the first step of improving your discipline system is just getting organized and creating a consistent system that everyone will use. One way to start is with the form itself that teachers and staff will use when there is a discipline problem in class or on campus.
If you would rather watch the video, here I explain my top tips for creating a form and even some dos and don’ts to make sure it doesn’t make things worse.
In my travels I see a wide range of procedures and documentation for Discipline Referrals In schools -from no system or documentation at all to forms that are so cumbersome and complex that teachers do not have time to fill them out.
Did you know that you should only have ONE piece of paper related to discipline?
You do NOT need detention slips, citations, demerits or any other piece of paper related to behavior. Click here for The ONE Discipline Referral free download! Because why start from scratch?
Here are my top tips, the Do’s and Don’ts of creating a discipline referral. A good discipline referral should be…
SIMPLE- It should be quick and easy for a teacher to complete. Think checkboxes. This is not a time for the teacher to have to write a story. It only needs enough information to the other staff member responding to get the idea of what happened. Let's be clear on the purpose of a Discipline Referral form - it is for documentation only. There is no evidence that writing on a piece of paper and handing it to a student changes their behavior.
CONSISTENT - Everyone at the school should use this form and ONLY this form. Get rid of all your other behavior forms like detention slips and citations and commit to using only one. If someone uses an old form, or emails you or hands you a post-it note in the hallway, kindly request that they complete the Discipline Referral. This will be important later when you go to look at your school data because you don’t want to be chasing down this information with a bunch of sticky notes, emails from teachers, or hallway conversations.
3. RESTORATIVE - On the backside of The ONE Discipline Referral I list the Restorative Questions so students can reflect on what happened, what they were thinking and feeling at the time, who was impacted, and what needs to happen to make things right moving forward (I even include an early childhood version with simpler language)!
*A note here, students need a caring adult to help them reflect on these questions, it is not an independent activity. Most students just don’t have the ability to reflect on their feelings, motivations, or on how they impact others yet, especially without someone there to listen to their side of things first. From little kids to teenagers, they need a lot of assistance. When a supportive adult goes over these questions verbally with the students that is when the real processing happens.
PROVIDE DATA - In PBIS, we use data collected from Discipline Referrals for targeted schoolwide planning & decision making. You are going to want data points like time of day & location. Check out my YouTube video on data-based decision making, but for now trust me when I tell you this data is very handy!
PROMOTE EQUITY - Finally, a good referral form is going to align with our values as educators and will actively combat disproportional discipline.
Disproportional discipline is when students from certain backgrounds, mainly students of color (specifically black students) and students with disabilities, are very often subjected to harsher punishments than their white peers. Even for similar behaviors. These students are at a higher risk of being sent out of the classroom with a discipline referral, being suspended, and being expelled. By the way, this trend is found across all school types, all grade levels and all socioeconomic statuses (Girvan et al., 2017; Monahan et al., 2014; Welch et al., 2010; United States Government Accountability Office Report to Congressional Requesters, 2018).
In order to actively work against disproportional discipline, we are going to start with what is NOT on the discipline referral form.
For starters, there should be NO Teacher Decision on Consequences.
Here’s why: Implicit bias rears its head when we are exhausted and stressed, right about the time a teacher has just about ‘had it’ with a student talking back, distracting the class, and generally misbehaving in such a way that teaching the rest of the class becomes impossible.
It’s hard. It’s stressful. It’s exhausting.
Unfortunately, most schools that I visit have a discipline referral form that requires a teacher or staff member to make a decision on the consequences right there, in the heat of the moment - you know checkboxes on the form for the student to be assigned a detention.
And in practice it becomes sort of a Breakfast Club situation, “One more word out of you and it’ll be detention! What's that? 30 minutes! 60 minutes!” and so on.
In order to be the positive educators and human beings that we want to be in the world, we need to simply create a little space here.
Instead of asking a teacher to make a decision in a stressful moment, it's better to refer the student to another adult who can help de-escalate the situation and determine an appropriate response.
We call this a neutralizing routine for a vulnerable decision point, and it helps promote equity and reduce disproportional discipline in schools.
The other thing you will notice is missing on this form is, you will notice there is a parent signature. This is very important. If your current form goes home to parents I would strongly recommend you stop doing that. This type of communication to parents is easily misinterpreted, does not promote a positive home school connection, and it can set kids up for abuse. Instead, call home when you are concerned about the child’s behavior. Check out my video on How to Call Home for Misbehavior so that this is a productive collaborative discussion with the parent that seeks to understand and problem-solve instead of blaming and shaming.
In my free download I am sharing the exact discipline referral that I created for all of the schools I work with. It has all the important data points and none of the problematic ones!
The teacher or staff should write no more than one sentence and maybe even indicate some strategies they’ve already tried. Then the person responding to the behavior would complete the “action taken” section on the bottom describing the consequence or response for example, apology, restitution, loss of privilege, community service, and so on.
On the backside I have included the Restorative Questions for the staff member to ask the student. If the student is waiting to talk to someone, they can complete these questions and begin to reflect while they wait.
Once you have a simple, easy to use Discipline referral, your school should develop a consistent procedure of when to use it. Check out the Restorative Discipline Flowchart to help get your whole staff on the same page about when to make a referral (which behaviors will be managed by teachers and staff and which behaviors will be referred to administrators).
When we get consistent procedures in place, our school becomes more predictable and safe. We start working together, making community agreements and creating systems. Once you get these systems in place, you can begin to layer in Restorative Practices, and that’s when it gets really exciting! That is when you get to the heart of the matter and really intervene and stop behaviors from the root.
If you are a school or district leader and want to work directly with me and other school administrators on the same path, check out my Restorative PBIS School Leadership Academy. School leaders from all over the US and other countries are signing up and together we will be transforming our schools with Restorative Practices and PBIS. enrollment is open now so go to lauramooiman.com and enroll today! I can’t wait to meet you!
REFERENCES
Girvan EJ, Gion C, McIntosh K, Smolkowski K. The relative contribution of subjective office referrals to racial disproportionality in school discipline. Sch Psychol Q. 2017 Sep;32(3):392-404. doi: 10.1037/spq0000178. Epub 2016 Oct 13. PMID: 27736122.
Monahan, K.C., VanDerhei, S., Bechtold, J. et al. From the School Yard to the Squad Car: School Discipline, Truancy, and Arrest. J Youth Adolescence 43, 1110–1122 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0103-1
Kelly Welch, Allison Ann Payne, Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline, Social Problems, Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 February 2010, Pages 25–48, https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.25
United States Government Accountability Office Report to Congressional Requesters, 2018. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-258
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