Title: The Harvard Educational Review - HEPG
Headings: Beyond Discipline

Content: It is particularly geared towards teachers, staff, and parents of elementary and secondary school students, with most of its examples taken from elementary school settings. Alfie Kohn, an educator turned writer, focuses his fifth book on an issue of central concern to any teacher or school administrator. He questions the entire premise upon which the field of classroom management bases itself, believing at the outset that educators should focus their time, energy, and attention on how to prevent the types of behavior that require management and discipline. As Kohn states in his introduction, the concept of "classroom management" assumes that teachers should "have a responsibility to get and maintain control of their classrooms" and to "secure children's compliance with adults' demands" (p. xii). He believes that classroom management and the extrinsic motivation it requires to change children's behavior is a "teacher-directed model" that is driven by a "remarkably negative set of beliefs about the nature of children" (p. xii). In this book he seeks to challenge some basic assumptions behind these notions, and to provide some concrete activities and questions with which teaching staff can engage in order to reflect upon their own student interactions and classroom practices. The first five chapters examine the assumptions behind traditional disciplinary approaches in general, using a few classroom discipline packages such as "Assertive Discipline" and "Cooperative Discipline" as targets of critique. In chapters one and two, Kohn argues convincingly that traditional disciplinary approaches begin from a negative view of children's nature (and human nature), and that these approaches tend to blame all behavioral problems on what is wrong with children rather than considering larger contextual issues such as curriculum and instruction that may be the source of behavior perceived as disruptive. In chapter three, he builds the case that the use of coercion, punishments, and rewards might result in students' temporary compliance but are not effective approaches for creating a warm, caring, and respectful learning community. In chapter four, Kohn makes the insightful point that what is often considered to be giving students a choice — either comply or suffer the consequences — is in fact another form of coercing students into obeying teachers' demands and requirements.