How School Discipline Should Look

by Margret & Ayushka
Published May 21, 2025

Many people remember being in a classroom, minding their own business when the class clown decides to stir up some trouble and decide to make the teacher mad. When this happens you get the most tragic kind of punishment. A group punishment. Then the teacher says something like, “you are a team when one person messes up you all are to blame.” It’s also not just children who disapprove of this, some adults do think this too. From a website called, The Conversation they say, “Group punishment doesn’t fix behaviour – it just makes kids hate school.” Because group punishments make kids hate school, we have decided to try to make a punishment that works and doesn’t make students hate school.

  Hi, my name is Margret and I am here to show you my perspective of a certain scenario and how it would be handled now versus how I wish it would be handled. Let’s say a teacher is gone and a substitute teacher is now here. But, the entire day they were ignored and disrespected by some of the students, so they wrote a note to the teacher without names of who caused trouble. How I think this scenario would play out is, all the kids are messing around and destroying the classroom and the substitute teacher gets really mad and tries to calm the kids down but they don’t want to stop messing around. How I wish this would be handled is, the teacher has some tasks for the students to do. If they don’t behave they have to do the tasks.

Hi, my name is Ayushka and I’m here to show you my perspective on the same scenario with the same questions. How I think the scenario would play out is, the teacher would make the entire class write a long letter to the substitute teacher and cut back on privileges. How I wish this would be handled is, the substitute teacher would have a list of everyone in the class's name and if she put a line next to it that meant they would get a less severe punishment like a letter. But, for every time that student would get a mark they would get another punishment added on or, the punishment would get more severe.:)

After gathering up all of the information written by Margret and Ayushka, we can join the ideas together to form a new idea of a punishment that could finally work. Ayushka’s idea was to make a tally system and Margret’s idea was a task for off task students. Joining these ideas together we’ve found a great way to make students listen. Our joint idea is, whenever a student misbehaves, the teacher would put a tally next to their name on a list. At the end of the day, you would be shown the amount of tally’s you have and that’s how many worksheets you will be given on a subject of the teacher’s choice. If you don’t complete them there will be missing homework on your report card. After this punishment is here for a couple of months and the homework amount rises, there will be less possibility of misbehaving students.

Even though this will mean that students will be less likely to misbehave, this shouldn’t really even be a problem. If it is, teachers, please try out our idea. The task sheets can be printed online. It’s really easy to implement. Here is an example of a chart to track strikes.