Student compliance will not mean ‘all teachers can teach’: a critical analysis of the rationale for ‘no excuses’ discipline

ABSTRACT

An increasing number of English schools are embracing an extreme approach to student behaviour dubbed ‘no excuses’ discipline, inspired by charter school chains in the United States. Proponents argue the approach is necessary to allow all teachers to teach and that it places responsibility where it should be: on the student. However, this rationale ignores the interactional nature of classroom disruption and discounts the role played by teachers and teaching. In this paper, I explain the concept of ‘cumulative continuity’ and then use this concept as a lens to make sense of classroom behaviour using observational data from a current longitudinal research project investigating the development of disruptive school behaviour. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of pedagogical contexts, the responsibility that adults have, and the fallacy of the notion that students must be forced to comply in a one-size-fits-all system because we cannot rely on all members of the teaching profession to do the same.

KEYWORDS:

• Behaviour management
• ‘no excuses’ discipline
• cumulative continuity
• classroom observation

Acknowledgements

The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Linda J. Graham is a Professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology. She leads QUT’s Student Engagement, Learning and Behaviour Research Group (#SELB) and is lead Chief Investigator on three current projects investigating the development of disruptive school behaviour, including a six-year longitudinal study funded by the Financial Markets Foundation for Children (2013–2015) and the ARC Discovery Projects scheme (2016–2019).

ORCID

Linda J. Graham http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6827-808X

Notes

1 Despite the supposed prevalence of student indiscipline, it appears this organisation did not acquire the minimum number of members needed to register as a political party with the Australian Electoral Commission and was therefore not listed on the 2016 Senate ballot paper.

2 It would be a mistake to point to Mr Smith’s relative lack of experience to explain this data. In other analyses, we have found no significant differences in CLASS scores between teacher participants with 0–3 years-experience and teachers with more than 5 years-experience. The only exception were 10 teachers with 4–5 years of experience who scored significantly lower than teachers in the other two groups.

3 Dojo points refers to the electronic ‘rewards’ system, ClassDojo, employed by many Queensland primary school teachers. The teacher sets target behaviours and rewards or punishes students for ‘making good choices’ (www.classdojo.com)

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP160100319).