Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Are you feeling swamped by the demands of being a principal? From juggling emails, calls, and decisions to boosting test scores and wading through endless paperwork, the pressure is real.
But imagine a scenario where you no longer feel this overwhelming stress. Picture yourself as a more resilient leader, concentrating on enhancing your school rather than merely coping with the daily tasks that currently consume your time.
I‘m Barb Flowers. Drawing upon my eight-year experience as an elementary principal, with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and certification as a life coach, Along the way, I've mentored and coached school leaders, guiding them to change their mindset, set boundaries and focus on their own well-being while navigating their roles.
Each episode offers practical insights on time management, communication, overcoming overwhelm, boosting confidence, and fostering a positive mindset. We'll also discuss topics like working with stakeholders, implementing new initiatives, and managing discipline. Let's set boundaries, focus on well-being, and reignite your passion for being a principal. Welcome to "The Principal's Handbook."
I firmly believe that to be an impactful educator, you must first become a confident and well-rounded individual. Join us in this journey to empower and enhance your confidence as a school leader.
Five Common Discipline Mistakes Principals Make
===
[00:00:00]
In today's episode, we're talking about the five most common discipline mistakes principals don't even realize they're making. That's all coming up next on the Principal's Handbook.
Speaker: Welcome to the Principal's Handbook, your go-to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self-care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority. I.
Welcome back to the podcast.
Today We are talking about the five most common discipline mistakes that principals don't even realize they're making.
So if you feel [00:01:00] like discipline is draining you more than it should, you're not alone and you're in the right spot today because. These mistakes that I'm going to talk about are so common. I talk to so many principals and discipline I know is a huge mental and time suck for a lot of principals. And you know, it's really important to make sure, that we aren't letting it just drive our whole, day or even role as a principal, right? There are so many dynamics that we have, and if you're an assistant principal, it might be part of your role. It might be the main part of your role. Every assistant principal job looks different. However, how you handle it and how you think about discipline can change everything.
I'm hoping that, if you struggle with discipline, you hate doing discipline, this episode could really help with that. Because once you have discipline in place and you have systems in place that help reduce discipline incidents, then you're able to actually be the instructional leader that you wanna be.
And so that's why I spend. So much time talking about discipline. [00:02:00] I mean, I'm truly passionate about instructional leadership, but you can't get there until you have systems in place in your building that you're able to make the time to do that. So that's why I'm so passionate about talking about time management, discipline, all of these things, because it is going to lead you to your vision of however you want your building to grow academically and how you wanna lead as an instructional leader.
. I'm going to jump right into these five mistakes. So mistake number one is treating every discipline situation like an emergency. Okay? And I will say that everybody else is going to treat every discipline situation like an emergency. And so
you as the leader, cannot react like that. Think about this. Your radio goes off, your adrenaline spikes.
For me in my building. They would do a beep on the announcement to show that they really needed me, and I would think, oh gosh, what is it?
Is it an angry parent? Is it a student? Like they just had a fight at recess or students did something in the classroom and I'm thinking, what is the emergency?
And , you get that adrenaline and [00:03:00] you're thinking, what do I have to handle? And so automatically when you get that adrenaline, you start to feel more emotional and you start to feel. Like this is an emergency and I have to fix it. Now also, you wanna be supportive and visible, right? I felt like if I heard that beep, I knew there was usually a problem.
People needed me, so I wanted to hurry up and get there, which could be really frustrating if I was doing a walkthrough or an observation or something like that where I'm trying to be an instructional leader and then you're pulled for discipline or some sort of other emergency. And so why that is a true problem is.
People that expect you to handle every situation right away like it's an emergency. And I used to tell people like, I can't just leave an observation because we're supposed to be in there for 30 minutes. And it's not fair to the teacher who took all this time to prepare for me to be in there for an observation, and I'm pulled out for 10 to 15 minutes of that observation.
That shouldn't be happening. And so it also creates this [00:04:00] environment. Of the principal always reacting instead of being more proactive and preventing the behavior, preventing whatever. That discipline emergency is. So we have to reframe that to not everything is urgent just because you're called and needed right away.
So I think the biggest thing , and what I really encourage you to do. Is to determine what is truly urgent, that somebody would need to pull you out right away or call you on the radio. We need you right now, , and help people understand what that is so that they're not calling you for little things.
And I did this actually with the secretaries and they were great once they. Got to know me and we figured out what was a true emergency, what wasn't. When I explained to them, when I'm in an observation, I cannot come out for little things. If a parent is here, they're going to have to come back or sit and wait.
If you know a discipline situation happened and nobody is. , Hurt or nobody's in extreme danger right now, then I can handle it when I'm done. I don't [00:05:00] need to handle it this second. , Most things don't have to be handled this second. I'm sure if you're in high school and the a fight breaks out and you're the only administrator to handle it.
Okay, then that probably needs you right now. But for the most part, like if you think about that, how many times a year is that happening? , Is that happening every day? , And if it is, I mean, that's a different kind of problem. So you really want to think about what are those situations that are urgent, that you need to be pulled from everything right now, and then
, really work with the teachers to empower them to handle discipline in the classroom. Obviously if it's happening multiple times, they could get you, but if it's little things, then they need to be handling it in the classroom. . And a lot of times when you're new and taking over a building and teachers don't know you, , this really has to be built up.
This is hard in the beginning and it has to be built up in that relationship built where they know that you'll support them with behavior, but there are things that they need to be handling in the classroom, and this is where like building level matrixes, things like [00:06:00] that are really helpful. I have that in my, , PBIS.
Tier one blueprint that I have at the eight to four principle.com, so you can check that out. Also link it in the show notes as well. But you wanna make sure that you have systems in place to empower other people to know what's urgent, what's not, so that you're not constantly pulled out. All right.
Mistake number two, making discipline decisions out of emotions. So you know, this happens, like I said, if you're. Called and , it seems urgent. So your adrenaline's going, that can cause you to make an emotional response because you're already upset thinking, I was in this observation or I was doing something and now I'm pulled out.
And so you have an emotional response. It could be that you're just tired and overwhelmed, you know, if it's the end of the week, the end of a day, and you've been making decisions all day, all week, and you're tired, that can impact your discipline decisions and they can be made out of emotions. . It could be certain students, you're tired of dealing with the same incident, the same student could be staff pressuring you for a certain consequence, or they want [00:07:00] you to do something specific and you feel like they're going to be mad.
That could stress you out. Create an emotion. Just remember that a lot of this comes from your fight or flight. So this is your response that is meant to protect you. This comes from your amygdala, , in the lower part back of your brain where it really is that fight or flight. And it's like how are you going to protect yourself when it comes to your job and when it comes to discipline.
And so what you need to be doing is making sure that you start to become aware of this. Because if you are emotional, when you're making disciplined decisions, is. It's going to lead to inconsistent discipline. It's going to, , have staff lose trust in you because they don't know what your discipline decision's going to be.
They don't know how you're going to respond because it's out of emotion. You're going to feel guilt afterwards or frustration. , It also doesn't go well when you talk to parents and you're in this place of this high emotion. And trust me, I know because I've done it.
, If you've done this, no guilt, it's just you need to. Really become aware of when you're emotional and when you are making these [00:08:00] decisions. So I want you to reframe and think to yourself, the calmer you are, the clearer the consequence will be. ? So the calmer you are, the clearer the consequence will be.
. Be aware of when you're emotional and pause before responding. This is what I mean when most things don't need a decision within, you could make the decision within 10 minutes, have kids sit out in the office and say, give me a minute. , And just take a minute to take a breath and make sure that you're in a good emotional state.
, really think about. Where am I emotionally and what do I need to do to calm down? Or if you're noticing you're heightened and you're upset, why? Is it because the student's triggering you, a staff member's triggering you?
What is it? And take a second to figure that out before you make a decision so that you know you make a decision that feels better for you. I know for me, I usually feel more emotional when I'm trying to do everything in a rush. Like it's the end of the day and I'm trying to make a decision before the kid leaves.
Just take a breath. And I've had to remind myself of that. , I can call the parent in a minute, [00:09:00] just give myself a second. 'cause otherwise I'm gonna call and I'm gonna be emotional and mad when I'm talking to them. And that doesn't create a good relationship or help with the consequence. So just really think about.
, Where you are emotionally and how you can just take a breath and get to a more neutral state so that you're not making decisions out of emotion. Mistake number three, you worry too much about pleasing others. So this happens a lot when, staff have expectations of this is how you should be disciplining.
And I notice that this happens if, for instance, you do PBIS in your building, but like staff haven't bought in with the mindset approach of PBIS. So they feel like kids should be suspended, and maybe you don't do that. I'm in a K two building right now, but even in a K five building in Ohio.
Kindergarten through third grade, you can't suspend. So somebody might want a kid suspended and you can't even legally do that, right? And so you can't worry about what people think you have to do. I always say you have to do what feels right for you. And so also, you [00:10:00] might worry about what, how the parent's going to respond.
You might feel this pressure to avoid conflict because. The parent's gonna be mad, the teacher's gonna be mad. And so you make a decision that you think will please others, , or you just wanna make sure you're being supportive enough. But at the end of the day, it might not be the right choice for the students.
So you have to be very careful. And again, be aware if you are making decisions. Trying to please others because when you try to please others, your decisions become inconsistent because it's all about what the other person thinks. You take on everybody else's emotions, which is stressful and going to make you more emotional, and you become very reactive instead of grounded.
And you actually as a leader will start to lose confidence in your ability to make decisions related to discipline. So you have to remind yourself, I'm not here to please everyone. I have to make a decision that I feel good about. And I think that that's really important because I'd always tell myself when I made a decision, at the end of the day, [00:11:00] I have to go home and live with that decision, not the teacher and not the parent.
, And so you really want to anchor your decisions in. You know what you believe about behavior, what you believe about the student, the situation, and something that you can actually stand behind when you call that parent, when somebody's upset with you because you know that you made the best decision based on what you know about the student, the situation and what you know about is going to actually help change the behavior.
So you have to anchor yourself in your beliefs about discipline and what helps students. Learn from discipline because remember, the goal of discipline is not just to have punitive punishment, you know that it's actually for kids to learn from the consequence. That's the whole idea of restorative practices or even PBIS is when we give consequences.
It's good to, you can still give consequences if you're focused on PBIS, but it's all about how are the kids going to improve moving forward? How are they going to continue to learn? So I want you to just. Have that why, for your discipline [00:12:00] decisions. And that's why I created a course for principals because I think so many principals worry about this.
So I have, , the principals discipline blueprint where I talk about making decisions that you feel good about, because that's the most important thing, is that you make a decision and you are happy with the decision that you make. All right. Mistake number four is taking ownership of problems that belong to others.
So often, you know, as principals, we're fixers, right? We wanna fix everything. We wanna be supportive of people. But what happens sometimes is people over refer kids to you. It kind of goes back to that idea of the matrix, where some things are a classroom issue that you need to help teachers handle in the classroom.
And again, you want to help because. You're the principal. It feels faster for you to handle it. You care about people. You wanna take things off other people. And this can really be a problem though, because then teachers start relying on you instead of building better systems in their [00:13:00] classrooms. , A lot of times I see this happens because maybe a teacher doesn't have a relationship with a kid.
So the first thing they do when they're frustrated is send them to you. , Or they don't have good systems in their classroom. And so what happens is your day just becomes interruption after interruption, and it could be from the same few teachers because of relationships with kids and systems that they have in the classroom.
We have to remember that kids learn from people they build relationships with, and so that's one piece of like behavior and PBIS that I think we all know, but we don't spend enough time talking about with kids. It's this idea of belonging connection. I mean, it's.
Such a huge thing, but yet we easily forget that. And it's easy for a teacher to forget that if a student annoys them or something about that student, they just struggle to build that relationship with. And so it's really important for us that we are not being the fixer and fixing everything for teachers, because what happens is we're actually not building [00:14:00] their capacity and
we're not helping them grow in their discipline. And it's. Giving away the power to us, right? The teachers lost the power and it's going to us because, , they're not handling in their classroom. So it's really important that we help and support teachers. And when kids need removed or anything like that, same student over and over, and they need to be in class and there's no reason they should be removed or we're finding that.
It's the same teacher that's struggling to handle discipline in their classroom, then we need to be supporting that teacher and giving them resources. , Use the discipline flow chart, use. . A behavior matrix of , , this is office managed, this is classroom managed.
Make sure that teachers have classroom systems, help them build relationships. If you notice they're struggling with relationships, coach teachers instead of rescue them. Because when we just do things for people, even if it seems easier, what we're doing is saying that you're really not capable of doing it and you're not building their capacity.
So we want to be careful. It's a fine line. [00:15:00] Between being supportive and really not helping people. , And actually, , taking away their power, not helping them build capacity. So that's something I want you to think about. That support doesn't mean taking over for people. Support means building their capacity to get better and handling these situations.
All right. And mistake number five is not having simple, consistent tier one expectations. And why this happens is you could have inherited weak systems and the building that you have, , maybe you've actually tried to do tier one supports with PBIS, and
, there wasn't enough professional development, and so staff are not clear about what it means. They haven't shifted the mindset. , Where's the problem? Is it there aren't those expectations? Is it that they're not being taught? Is it that teachers don't believe in them? Is that teachers don't know them?, What is the problem happening in the building? And then what happens when we don't have those tier one expectations is kids get mixed messages because they're told different things in different classes.
Think about if you're in a middle [00:16:00] school or high school, they've got. Six to eight different teachers throughout the day telling them different expectations that aren't consistent at all. That's going to be hard to follow. , Also staff blame kids or parents instead of thinking of the system and , we can all be guilty of that, getting upset about outside circumstances that we can't control, but we really have to focus on what we can control, which is having a system in place to help students and then consequences feel random because what are you even giving a consequence for if you don't know the expectation?
Like you don't know if they broke an expectation, if you don't have clear expectations, . And then also behavior escalates faster. So you have to remember, having clarity around tier one expectations is the number one thing that's going to help reduce behaviors in the building. Having clarity around tier one expectations is the number one thing that's going to help reduce behavior in the building.
So what to do instead if you don't have expectations first. Build [00:17:00] them, create three to five universal expectations. Respectful, responsible, in control. That's what's in my school. I've seen. Safe, outstanding, accountable, respectful. There's all kinds of different ones you could do. , And this is where chat GPT can be really helpful because you can make it go with your school.
, Also creating a simple matrix. Something that just shows, this is where you know how kids behave in the hallway. These are the expectations. This is how they should be on the playground. This is how they should be in the classroom. This is how they should be wherever they are, they should know what that looks like and have clear expectations.
And this comes from a simple matrix. And then , reteach those expectations all the time. , I'm in an elementary, but the high school in my district talks about how they reteach expectations and model it with kids even in the high school. So we can't think, oh, they're too old. They should know. , Every age we need to be retaught expectations.
Even I, as an adult, I like to know what is the expectation of me in this role, right? And [00:18:00] kids should be the same. What is that expectation? Because I don't, like if I get. Feedback or told like You didn't do something I wanted you to do, but I didn't know what the expectation was clearly. And we can say, oh, , kids know, they've been taught, they've been in school for this many years, but if they're not explicitly taught, it's really not fair for us to have consequences for an expectation that wasn't taught.
So that is a huge issue if you're not having those explicit expectations for kids. So those are the five mistakes. I just wanna go through them quickly. So mistake number one is treating every discipline situation like an emergency mistake. Number two, making discipline decisions out of emotion. Mistake number three, worrying too much about pleasing others.
Mistake number four, taking ownership of problems that belong to others. And mistake number five, not having simple, consistent tier one expectations. And I'm gonna put a link to the resources I talked about in this podcast episode because I have the tier one behavior blueprint where I talk about everything [00:19:00] that you need for PBIS and really implementing that in your building. And then I also have the Principle's discipline blueprint, which really focuses on your mindset around discipline, how you handle situations when you feel.
Like you're trying to please others or you're making decisions, and it just doesn't feel like it's really clear to you. I have everything you need to make that more clear and to have more confidence in everything that you're doing. Okay? So check those out. But I want you to think about these mistakes.
These mistakes are common. Most principles have made some or all of these mistakes, including myself, but just know they're fixable, once you become aware of the problem, you're able to fix it, and it's all part of growing as a leader.
So no guilt if you've done any of these mistakes, but just think, how can you get better in these areas? Which one of these mistakes resonated with you most? You're not behind as a principal, you're building systems that. Most principles were never taught in college. We're learning all of this as we go when it comes to discipline.
It's not something that we're [00:20:00] explicitly taught, and so we have to figure it out as we go. And so that's where if you can figure out which of these mistakes resonated with you, reflect on it, that's going to help you the most. All right. If you love the show, if you're listening on Apple, scroll down on your app and leave a review, but just keep in mind that you have the power to shape your life according to the mindset you choose.
I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you back here next time.