school discipline - who has failed?

After the second week of the Social Foundations class, I was walking down the hall and saw a white male teacher approach a black male student about shoving a female student in the hall. As I walked up, I saw the student getting angry and shutting out the teacher, but I saw the teacher’s frustration level rising and felt that there was not much good happening. I approached the student and as gently as I could, set my hand on his shoulder and asked him to respect the teacher and look at him. The student briefly complied, but when the teacher continued to speak in frustration, the student quickly shut down and would not comply with the teacher. At that point, I asked the student to walk with me to the office. He quickly started saying loudly, “If you touch me again, we are going to have a problem.” I assured him that I would not touch him as long as he continued to the principal’s office. As he walked down the hall, he threw his binder down the hall and continued to offer his threat of giving me a problem.
After the principal had the student in her office, I went to speak with the teacher who initially confronted the student. We were speaking about discipline, and how it often fails both the victim of the offense and offender. Resolution is rarely found, restoration is seen as the offender never offering an apology or having any chance to be forgiven. Discipline is carried out apart from the victim(s) and offers an unhealthy detachment for the offender.
My co-worker and I decided to try a different approach. Instead of letting the student simply go to the office and receive his punishment, he went and spent 30 minutes talking to the student, understanding his perspective, receiving an apology, and forgiving the student. The principal came to me to ask what I felt the disciplinary action should be. My co-worker and I had spoke, and decided that if the student had changed his attitude and apologized to both of us, could re-enter class, and we made that choice to give a different perspective on life than this student had encountered before. The principal decided to give him in school suspension for primarily as a social discipline to show the student’s friends that his behavior is not acceptable.
At the end of the day, my co-worker and I talked about the perspective of the student. This student may be in a gang, which puts him highly at risk, and puts him in a social environment where backing down from a challenge is unacceptable. With this teacher’s confrontation being in front of one of the student’s friends, the student’s social environment tells him to never back down. My co-worker upon reflection realized that he was bound and determined to get the student to respect him, and nothing was going to stop him. With the attitudes that were entering the confrontation, nothing positive could have come from it. I simply stepped in at the wrong time for the student, and deflected his anger and frustration from my co-worker to myself.
I would love to be able to say that my co-worker sitting and crying with the student and forgiving him caused a change in behavior, but I can’t. The student was supposed to apologize to me when I visited him and also cried with him, and seek me or my coworker when he was struggling. He was smiling at us and waving at us at the end of the day. Unfortunately, I never received my apology, and his niceness to us didn’t last long. I received phone calls from his grandmother the next school day questioning why I had “thrown him into the wall” and how her son could be in trouble if I did that. His social circles continued to dictate his actions, over and above an attempt at showing him a better way.
The next week, he was in trouble again, but this time he punched a hearing impaired student for bumping into him in a hallway and threatened another student who was dating his girlfriend’s sister. After those incidents, the principal suspended him for 10 days and he now must go before the superintendent before he may return.
My co-worker and I tried to use inquiry and perspectives to help find a different method to discipline the student. My co-worker thought that he could get his point through to this student by raising his voice, but that was a mistake. We wanted him to be a part of the process to help him see what needed to happen for him to succeed. Unfortunately, it is too little, and too late. Discipline that is reactive and punitive has combined with an adversarial social environment in this student’s life to create a problematic mixture.
Ways the Social Foundations perspective changes my ideas on student discipline: More people must be involved in the process. In the place of people advocating for their own position, students and faculty should be involved in the process. This will take much more time, but will provide a healthier and more holistic approach to each student. It may also give time for emotions to subside. It would also give a place for feelings of victims to be expressed and potentially model healthy communication between peers and between faculty and students. This improvement in communication could lead to a decrease in misunderstanding that is caused by quick and overly judgmental thoughts and decisions. The idea of taking a longer time to decide on punishment is scary in a school, because discipline is often thought to be best when quick and firm.