Purpose

• Teachers design classroom discipline plans to regulate student behavior, seeking to encourage positive behaviors while discouraging negative ones. Ideally, classroom discipline should enhance a student's ability to both excel in his studies and build valuable social skills.
  
  

Types

• Three types of discipline that teachers must use to effectively manage a classroom are preventive discipline, supportive discipline and corrective discipline. Through preventive discipline, teachers enact measures to avoid discipline problems from the outset of a class by implementing intelligent seating arrangements and creating appealing lesson plans. Supportive discipline is used while class is in session to help redirect students who lose focus or who may not readily understand material. Corrective discipline is used to deal with students who refuse to follow instructions. All three types of discipline are necessary and useful in a classroom, according to Columbia Interactive, an online extension of Columbia University, which emphasizes that "although you may find one category more suitable to your personal teaching style than another, circumstances will often call for alternate disciplinary approaches."
  
  

Implementation

• Effective discipline within a classroom requires attentiveness, decisiveness and patience on behalf of a teacher. However, students must also understand a teacher's expectations. To facilitate student comprehension, teachers should briefly describe a handful of desirable behaviors and attitudes and then provide students with formal opportunities to practice such behaviors. For example, if a teacher wishes for students to raise their hands before standing up to sharpen their pencils, she should invite volunteers to demonstrate this desirable behavior.
  
  

Misconceptions

• While "discipline" is a term that often carries negative connotations, discipline is not chiefly demonstrated through acts of deprivation. Teachers who are interested in producing meaningful results when disciplining children also provide these students with opportunities to achieve recognition for exceptional performance. Instead of expecting students to follow vague directions that they may not even understand, teachers should supply students with specific directions. Furthermore, "teachers should focus on those students who do follow the directions, rephrasing the original directions as a positive comment" and recognizing cooperative individuals, according to Lee Canter, author of "Assertive Discipline: More Than Names on the Board and Marbles in a Jar."
  
  

Considerations

• Students should be made aware of a classroom discipline plan at the outset of a semester, and their teacher should follow this plan consistently. Failure to do so sends the students mixed signals and complicates classroom dynamics. If necessary, teachers may express flexibility in how they enforce classroom rules, but they must never ignore them completely. Otherwise, the rules are simply robbed of their meaning.