Relationships Among Teachers’ Positive Discipline, Students’ Well-being and Teachers’ Effective Teaching: A Study of Special Education Teachers and Adolescent Students With Learning Disabilities in Taiwan

Abstract

The authors proposed a positive discipline, well-being and teaching effectiveness model that suggested that teachers’ positive discipline would facilitate students’ well-being and effective teaching, and students’ well-being would play a mediating role in the association between positive discipline and teaching effectiveness. The model was tested by including 255 resource room teachers (mean age = 32.71 years, SD = 7.09) and 255 matched adolescent students with learning disabilities (mean age = 14.06 years, SD = .74). Teachers responded to a scale for rating positive discipline strategies, and adolescents completed a students’ well-being questionnaire and a students’ awareness of teachers’ teaching effectiveness questionnaire. To evaluate the fit between the collected data and the proposed model, structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data. The results supported the proposed model and revealed that the link between teachers’ repertoire of positive discipline strategies and their students’ perception of teaching effectiveness was partially mediated by students’ well-being. Thus, the authors suggest that instead of eliminating individual student misbehaviours, teachers should focus more on positive classroom management, which is linked to improved outcomes for students and teachers.

Keywords:

• Adolescent well-being
• positive discipline
• resource room teachers
• secondary education
• special education
• special needs
• students with learning disabilities
• teaching effectiveness