Disclaimer—This is a blog post. It is off-the-cuff, not scholarly, from memory, etc., etc. Hope it provokes discussion. Not intended to be more than the beginning of a conversation.
A commenter on a previous post, “Steve P,” asked about the line “pedagogical methods used in dealing with discipline” in a document called “Description of the Main Characteristics of Waldorf Education.” He kindly posted a link to the English version, which I’ve copied here. My response here is too long to post as a comment on a comment, and the conversation is worth bringing out in the open, so I thought I’d make it a new post.
In my experience, there are few consistently used methods for discipline issues—including bullying and teasing—in Waldorf elementary schools. (Kim John Payne has done a lot of work with Waldorf schools in this area, but I don’t know how many schools use his methods, much about them, how much of it seeps in after he’s gone, etc. Comments, anyone?)
Some teachers are kind and gentle, others are “old school” and harsh. I have known teachers who have used methods indistinguishable from those my teachers used in public school in the 1960s and 1970s—shaming, sending a student out of the room, changing a student’s seat, giving a demerit or “white” or “pink” slip (varies by school), yelling or shouting, meeting with students who are involved in a fracas, having students write repeatedly that they will not (or will) do something, requiring written or face-to-face apologies, calling or threatening to call parents, and, in cases that resulted in teachers being fired, hitting a student or tying a student to a chair.
The one “method” of which I know that may be different from that used in other schools is what teachers often call “pedagogical stories.” Say two students have a conflict because one student calls another names and the second student responds by hitting. Of course, the teacher should stop this behavior immediately, demand apologies, explain that the students know that this is not right, call parents if necessary, and so on. But teachers in Waldorf schools will then often make up (or find) a story in which two characters behave in a way analogous to the way the children (mis) behaved, including, perhaps, egregious or dire or ridiculous consequences in the story for those who do not reform their behavior. I’m not saying this is what Steiner intended (I’m pretty sure it’s not quite right), but I know it goes on. My son was on to it early, and would tell us at the dinner table in 2nd grade, “Well, everyone knows that the frog is Daniel, who hit Christopher yesterday, who’s the other frog, because they were fighting over a toy truck, which is the lily pad in the story.” Perhaps his teacher was particularly obvious. Perhaps such stories have an effect even when they’re transparent. Anyway, that’s how it goes.
I’ve also heard of—but not witnessed—teachers’ non-intervention because they believe in “letting the children work it out (perhaps karmically).” If there is karma, it works forward and backward, applies at all times to all circumstances, and inaction is as karmically loaded as action would be.
Which reminds me of some of Steiner’s remarks on seating children according to temperament (would it help, skeptics, if we said personality? The “big five” personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion—that many developmentalists discuss mirror some aspects of temperament, and then add “neurotic,” which I think of as a personality disorder, rather than a personality in its own right). One idea was that children seated with “like” children would temper their own personalities (temperaments) in reaction to those around them. Frankly, isn’t that how many of us change our behavior and personality over time? If we do at all? Anyway, I suppose this could be called a disciplinary method in some way.
Continuing with class discipline, it’s important to focus on the positive, too. The best teachers I’ve known—the ones I aim to emulate in my own teaching—rarely, if ever, have discipline problems in their classrooms.
Harry Kretz comes to mind, a gentleman so dignified, so respectful of his students, so careful of his time in the classroom, and with such a dry wit, that he could teach for years without a hint of a discipline problem. Not everyone can or should be Harry—each of us has his or her own qualities as a person and as a teacher—but he was fully himself and could therefore allow students to be fully themselves, without the need to “act out.”
As my friend George McWilliam points out, student misbehavior is often due to unease or anxiety and should fundamentally be addressed by a change in the teacher, not imposed on the student by the teacher. Any teacher facing misbehavior may ask, why does this student believe that this is an acceptable way to behave? It’s rare that students misbehave simply for the sake of being “bad.” Students may be bored, anxious, unsettled, overtaxed, insecure, confused, and on and on. It’s the teachers job to address these issues without making them the problems of the student.
Separate from individuality and from addressing nagging unresolved issues in a class, the most positive steps I believe I can take toward classroom discipline are in creating anticipation and expectation at the end of a class so that students enter the next day focused on learning what I’ve hinted at the day before. And, in class, working to generate and maintain interest and to engage students in learning so that they are so focused on what we’re doing (and not on what they could do that would disrupt or distract) that it simply doesn’t occur to them to misbehave. Ideally, if someone does begin to misbehave, the students are allies in helping him or her quickly restore order to get on with what we’re about.
This last point can be taken to a sentimental or spectacular extreme—one of the reasons I so detest the movie “Dead Poets Society”—and must be deep and authentic to be sustained and healthful. Lots of room for error, lots of time for practice. Never a dull moment.
To end, I continue to resist the archaic word “pedagogical.” In U.S. English (and maybe in British English, as well), the word should be “educational.” A pedagogue is not just a teacher—as he or she may have been a couple of centuries ago—but, in caricature, an old, dried-out, unchanging, unfeeling, know-it-all. Yuck.
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