A kid walks into your room in the first week of school. They don’t know your name yet. They don’t know your rules yet. They don’t know if this is a room where they’re going to be okay.

They know one thing fast, though, because their eyes do it before their brain catches up. They scan the walls.

Most of the time this takes a few seconds and nobody notices it happening, including the kid. But something got read in those few seconds. Some message landed, and it landed before you said a single word to that student.

Here’s the part that trips people up. You put something on the wall. You did not necessarily decide what it says.

“Nobody Reads the Wall”

I’ve heard this line from good teachers, tired teachers, teachers who care a lot about the actual instruction happening in the room, and teachers who treat the walls as an afterthought once the bulletin board deadline hits. Nobody reads the wall. It’s wallpaper. The kids are looking at their computers, at each other, at the clock, not at a laminated quote from somebody they’ve never heard of.

Here’s what that objection gets right. Nobody is standing in front of your Frederick Douglass poster reading it word for word like it’s an assignment. That’s true, and it’s also not the point.

Reading is not the mechanism. Recognition is.

A kid does not need to read “if there is no struggle, there is no progress” to register that struggle exists on this wall, on purpose, as something worth naming instead of hiding. A kid does not need to study “when we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary” to register that feelings are allowed to exist out loud in this specific room. That registration happens in the quick scan, not in a close reading.

So the wall isn’t silent just because nobody’s reading it line by line. It’s talking constantly. The question is whether you chose what it’s saying or it’s saying something by accident.

Grab the free set of all 10 posters used in this piece, ready to print, at this link.

The Wall You Actually Picked

We build these walls fast, usually in the last week of summer, and some of us never stop to ask what we just put up. You saw something cute on Pinterest. You had a quote that’s meant something to you personally since college. Somebody gave you a poster as a gift, and you felt obligated to hang it. A district-approved set arrived in a box, and you put it up because it filled space and looked like effort.

None of that is a character flaw. It’s just how walls get made when nobody asks the harder question: what is this actually telling the kids in this specific room, this specific year?

That question matters more than which quote you picked, because the classroom wall quotes showing up again and again on the corners of Instagram right now are not making one claim. They’re making six, stacked on top of each other, and most teachers who have all six up have never once noticed they’re saying six different things.

Take growth mindset first. Not the flattened poster version about trying your best. The Angelou and Douglass version, which says struggle isn’t proof something is wrong with you; struggle is the mechanism. That’s a claim about failure being survivable and expected, not a claim about optimism.

Facing things instead of dodging them is a separate claim entirely. Baldwin says nothing gets changed until it’s faced. Gorman says you have to be brave enough to see the light before you’re brave enough to be it. Both are telling a kid that naming a hard thing out loud is the move, not the mistake, which happens to be the opposite of what most classrooms actually teach. Most classrooms teach that the smoothest day is the best day and conflict is something you minimize and move past fast.

Then there’s Fred Rogers doing exactly what Fred Rogers always did, naming something everyone already suspected but rarely says to a kid directly. Feelings are allowed to be spoken here. Not managed silently. Not saved for the counselor’s office. Spoken.

MLK’s intelligence-plus-character line is quietly arguing against a room that only cares how you perform on paper.

That’s a lot of ground for ten laminated squares of wall space to cover. Most teachers never audit for any of it. They audit for whether it looks nice next to the reading corner.

The Moment This Actually Matters

Here’s where it stops being theoretical. A kid walks into your room this year carrying something. Maybe it’s a parent who just left. Maybe it’s a body that doesn’t look like the other bodies in the room yet. Maybe it’s a first language that isn’t the one being spoken around them. Maybe it’s just a bad morning that’s about to turn into a bad year if nobody catches it early.

That kid does not need a lecture in the first few seconds. They need to clock, without anyone explaining it to them, whether this is a room where someone like them gets to exist without apologizing for it.

A wall with Malala and Jemison and Anne Frank on it is telling that kid something specific: someone who has been through something, who did not look like the default, still mattered enough to end up on a wall. That matters to a kid who’s spent the summer feeling invisible. It’s still just a signal, though, not a rescue.

That distinction matters, because this is exactly where the idea gets oversold in one direction and dismissed in the other.

Grab the free set of all 10 posters used in this piece, ready to print, at this link.

Where This Goes Too Soft

If you’re the teacher who already believes in this stuff, here’s the uncomfortable part. A poster of someone who looks like a struggling kid does not fix the struggle. Representation on a wall is not instruction, and it will not teach a kid what to do when things get hard. It won’t hold the boundary either, when that same kid crosses one five minutes later. That part is still your job.

A kid can feel seen by Malala’s poster at 8:05 and still need a clear, held expectation at 8:20. Those aren’t in tension. The wall does ambient work. It does not do the work that requires you, in the room, in real time, saying what needs to be said.

Where This Goes Too Dismissive

If you’re the teacher who thinks none of this matters, here’s the other side of it. A wall that’s silent on struggle, silent on feelings, silent on who gets to belong here, is not a neutral wall. It’s a wall that’s saying: figure it out, don’t bring the hard stuff in here, and hope the kids who need to see themselves reflected somewhere find it elsewhere. That’s still a message. It’s just one nobody chose on purpose.

This is Before-stage work, the groundwork that gets laid down long before behavior ever gets hard. Nobody thinks of a wall as part of that work, because it doesn’t feel like an intervention. It just sits there. That’s exactly why it needs a real audit instead of a vibe check.

The Audit, Not the Overhaul

You don’t need to rip down what’s up and start over tonight. You need five minutes, done with a specific question in mind, next time you’re in the room without kids.

Stand at your door and look at your wall the way the hardest kid on your incoming roster will look at it, the one most likely to walk in already feeling like an outsider. For everything on that wall, run three questions. What claim is this making? Who is it actually for? Would I still hang it if I couldn’t answer that?

If the honest answer to the last one is “because I like it” or “because it matched the color scheme,” notice that and move on; it’s not a crime. It’s just not the same as choosing it on purpose. Anything that fails all three, take down. You don’t need a replacement ready before you do it. An empty spot on a wall says less than a message you can’t defend.

Then ask the room-level version once, standing back from the whole thing. Does anything up there say struggle is survivable instead of implying things are supposed to go smoothly? Does anything say feelings get to exist out loud in here? Does anyone up there look like the kid most likely to need it this year? You don’t need six themes represented perfectly. You need to know what’s actually up there instead of assuming it’s neutral because it’s been there since August.

Grab the free set of all 10 posters used in this piece, ready to print, at this link.

More Resources

Want to explore this approach further? Check out my book, Hacking School Discipline, where we rethink student behavior by shifting from traditional punishment to restorative practices that foster relationships and accountability.

I was in a staff meeting once where the administration rolled out a new grading initiative. That sentence probably already tells you half the story, because schools have a special talent for introducing the next thing before the last thing has actually become a thing.

This was not the first initiative. There were two others still technically in progress, which is a generous way of saying they had been introduced, partially implemented, and then left to float around the building like abandoned furniture. Teachers were still trying to figure out what had stuck from the last rollout. Some people were doing pieces of it. Some people were doing what they thought they were supposed to be doing. Some people had quietly gone back to what worked because nobody had followed up anyway.

Then came the next thing.

A teacher raised her hand. She did not do it dramatically, and she was not trying to turn the room into a complaint session. She just named what everyone else was already calculating in their heads. We had not finished the last two things. People were stretched. This new initiative was going to take time, and nobody in the room knew where that time would come from.

The administrator’s response was immediate: “We will always do what is best for kids.”

The room went quiet, but not the kind of quiet that means people agree. It was the kind of quiet that means people know the conversation is over. You could feel teachers making the same calculation at the same time: not here, not today, not worth it. The teacher sat back. The initiative was explained. People wrote things in notebooks. Nobody said anything else.

That sentence did something sneaky. It sounded supportive. It sounded mission-driven. It sounded like the kind of thing no decent educator should argue with because, of course, everyone in that room wanted what was best for kids. That was not the issue. The issue was capacity. The issue was implementation. The issue was that another item had just been placed on top of a pile nobody had had time to sort through.

But the response moved the conversation away from capacity and into commitment. Suddenly, the teacher’s practical concern sat under a shadow it did not deserve. If she kept pushing, it would sound like she was arguing against kids.

That is when positivity becomes a problem.

The Problem Does Not Move

Most toxic positivity in schools does not arrive with bad intentions. It usually comes from someone who means well, someone who is tired, or someone who cares but does not know what to do with the problem sitting in front of them. I have probably said some version of it myself. Most of us have.

It is the sentence you reach for when someone tells you they are drowning and you do not have a smaller class, a better schedule, an extra planning period, a sub, or a clean solution for the student situation that keeps blowing up third period. So you say what you have reached within. “Stay positive.” “Focus on what you can control.” “You’ve got this.” “Every day is a new day.” “Our kids need us to show up.”

The person saying it usually wants you to feel better. That is the part that makes this complicated. But a teacher who is naming a real problem does not always need encouragement first. Sometimes they need someone to admit that the thing they are carrying is actually heavy.

Toxic positivity does not make hard things easier. It makes people feel wrong for finding them hard. A teacher names a class size that makes differentiation feel impossible, and someone reminds her to focus on what she can control. A teacher says the behavior plan is not working: the same student is back in the room with the same trigger and the same outcome every day, and someone tells him that tomorrow is a fresh start. A teacher says the caseload is too much, the meetings are stacked, and the paperwork is eating the job, and the response is a warm reminder that the work matters.

Of course, the work matters. That is why the teacher is still there.

The problem does not move just because someone softened the language around it. The class size is still there. The behavior concern is still there. The schedule is still there. The lack of support remains. The impossible expectation is still sitting in the middle of the room, wearing a lanyard. Now there is just something sitting on top of it: shame.

A teacher came in with one hard thing and left with two. There is the hard thing itself, and there is the feeling that they should not have found it hard. That is not support. It sounds like support. It functions like dismissal.

What Positivity Protects

I think that is what bothered me so much about that staff meeting. The administrator did not yell. Nobody was shamed directly. Nobody said, “Stop complaining.” Nobody had to. The values statement did the work. It made the concern feel out of bounds without ever saying so.

That is why this kind of language is so powerful inside schools. Schools run on moral language. We do what is best for kids. We show up. We serve. We keep going. Those statements can be true and still be used in ways that shut people down. A sentence can be warm and still close a door.

When a school responds to a teacher’s struggle with positivity before it has listened to the actual concern, it is not protecting the teachers. It is protecting the problem. That may sound harsh, but watch the pattern. If teachers stop naming what is hard, no one has to fix it. If the conversation can be redirected toward attitude before it lands on workload, policies, schedules, support, coverage, funding, or leadership decisions, then the conversation never gets close enough to the lever that would require something to change.

A teacher who names a problem requires a response. A teacher who has been encouraged to adjust their perspective requires much less. This is not a conspiracy. I do not think most leaders are sitting in offices trying to silence people with inspirational language. I think they are often trying to keep the building moving. I think they are trying to hold morale together with the tools they have. I think they are also overwhelmed. But impact does not disappear because intent was kind.

That staff meeting moved on. That is what I remember. The slides kept going. The room behaved. On paper, the meeting probably looked successful because nobody pushed back after that. But silence is not the same as buy-in. Sometimes silence is just what happens when people learn the cost of honesty.

Real Support Does Not Rush the Reframe

Real support sounds different. It does not have to solve everything immediately, and that is where people get nervous, especially leaders. They hear a concern and think acknowledgment means they have agreed to fix the whole thing by Monday. It does not. Acknowledgment is not a blank check. It is not surrender. It is the basic honesty required before anything useful can happen.

In that staff meeting, a different response would have changed the room. Not a perfect response. Not a magical one. Just an honest one. The administrator could have said, “You are right. We have not finished the last two things.” Or, “That is a fair concern.” Or, “Help me understand what would make this doable.” Or even, “We may not be able to solve all of that today, but we need to name it before we pretend this rollout will work.”

Those sentences would not have fixed the initiative. They would not have added time to the schedule or finished the last two rollouts. But they would have done something important. They would have confirmed that the teacher describing the problem was not the problem.

That matters more than people think. Teachers can handle hard things. They do it every day. They handle the student who melts down five minutes before the observation. They handle the parent email that arrives with three paragraphs and no punctuation. They handle the copier jamming when they are already late. They handle the lesson that looked brilliant at 9 p.m. and somehow falls apart by 9:12 the next morning.

Teachers are not fragile because they want reality named. They are professionals because they know reality matters.

Naming the Hard Thing Is Not Negativity

There is a version of this argument that will get used against what I am saying. It goes like this: “If everyone named every hard thing, the whole building would spiral.” I understand that concern. I also think it confuses accuracy with complaining.

Naming a hard thing is not the same as turning every meeting into a grievance parade where solutions go to die beside the stale bagels. It is not the same as dragging adult frustration into the middle of a lesson. It is not the same as projecting exhaustion onto students. Those are real problems, but they are problems of what people do with a named difficulty. They are not proof that the difficulty should never be named.

You cannot fix what nobody is allowed to say out loud. If a schedule is breaking people, someone has to be able to say so. If a behavior system looks clean on paper but falls apart in classrooms, someone has to be able to say that. If a new initiative requires time teachers do not have, someone has to be able to say that before everyone pretends the rollout failed because teachers were resistant to change.

Teachers know the difference between negativity and accuracy. They also know when accuracy is being punished.

What to Say Instead

That is why the first move matters. When someone names a hard thing, resist the urge to make it smaller too quickly. Do not rush to “at least.” Do not rush to “but the kids.” Do not rush to “we are all tired.” Do not rush to the part where everyone is supposed to feel better before anyone has been honest.

Start with the truth. Say, “That sounds hard.” Say, “You are not wrong.” Say, “I can see why that would be frustrating.” Say, “We need to look at that.” Then move toward the next useful question. What part of this can we actually change? What do you need first? What would make this more manageable by next week? Who else needs to hear this?

That is not negativity. That is leadership. That is collegiality. That is what support sounds like when it is grounded in reality rather than floating above it.

And sometimes, yes, the answer will be that nothing big can change today. Schools are full of constraints. Budgets are real. Staffing is real. Time is real. Nobody needs to pretend to be a magician. But even then, acknowledgment still matters. A teacher can handle: “I cannot fix all of this today, but I hear you, and you are right that it is too much.”

That lands differently than “stay positive.” One keeps the person in reality. The other asks them to decorate the problem.

I am not arguing that teaching should become a grievance loop. I am arguing the opposite. When teachers are supported honestly, they are more likely to stay in the work with some sense of agency left. When they can name what is hard and have it received instead of deflected, they are more likely to find real solutions to real problems. The investment is not in complaining. The investment is in accuracy.

Toxic positivity does not produce that. It produces compliance and silence for a while. Then it produces burnout, departure, resentment, or the kind of quiet disengagement that is easy to mistake for peace. The hard thing deserves to be named because unnamed problems do not disappear. They just become part of the culture.

More Resources

Want to explore this approach further? Check out my book, Hacking School Discipline, where we rethink student behavior by shifting from traditional punishment to restorative practices that foster relationships and accountability.

It is May. The laminate is peeling, the lesson plans are getting shorter, and a blank space on the whiteboard keeps catching your eye.

I have filled that space with a number. More than once.

Some of those years, the countdown was genuinely for the students. Theme days, reflection activities, something that made the final two weeks feel like a closing chapter worth showing up for. The room stayed with me. Students finished things.

Other years, I will be honest with you: the countdown was for me. I was tired. I said it out loud. “Only nine more days, you guys.” The tone I used left no confusion about what those nine days meant to me. Within a week, my students had decided what they meant too. Work slowed. Peer conflicts picked up. The room reflected exactly what I had communicated without realizing I was communicating it.

That is the whole argument in two years of May. What the countdown is actually pointing toward.

Why Teachers Are So Divided

“My kids love the countdown. It gets them through the last two weeks. You’re overthinking this.”

Fair. Teachers who use countdowns are responding to something real. The last stretch of school is hard to manage. A themed calendar or a balloon chain gives students something to anticipate, creates a shared ritual out of what can otherwise feel like a directionless march through reviews and restlessness, and keeps energy from collapsing. That is a legitimate classroom management move. Anyone who dismisses it has not been in a room in mid-May.

The concern is also real. A countdown can signal that school is something to be escaped. It can communicate, without a single word, that the adult at the front has already mentally left. And for some students, the countdown points to the loss of the most stable thing in their week.

The divide exists partly because “countdown” is not one practice. A public days-left wall tracker is different from a themed celebration calendar. A countdown students can earn or lose is different from a two-minute timer that helps a kid with transitions know what is coming next. A private teacher countdown on your phone is different from announcing to twenty-eight students that you are almost done with this. These get lumped together in the debate, which is why two teachers with completely opposite experiences can both be responding to something true.

What the Research Actually Says (And Doesn’t)

There is no peer-reviewed research I found that isolates classroom summer countdowns as a direct cause of student anxiety or behavior problems. Worth stating clearly, because overclaiming this is one fast way to lose the skeptical teacher who most needs to hear it.

What we can say more carefully is this: transitions can raise stress, especially for students who depend on school for structure and predictability (Effective School Solutions, 2025). When routines loosen, and adults signal they have mentally moved on, the students who rely most heavily on those routines are often the first ones we notice struggling. A summer countdown sits right in the middle of that kind of transition.

Teacher observations fill in the messy part that the research has not studied directly yet. A kindergarten teacher described behavior escalating the week she hung her countdown, and a piece in a national education publication argued that as the numbers go down, anxiety rises for students who rely on school for safety and structure. These are not experimental data. They are the observations of people who were in the room, paying close attention, and they are consistent with what we know about transitions and stress.

Countdowns probably do not cause these problems on their own. But they can sharpen what students are already carrying. That distinction matters for how you build yours.

When a Countdown Sends the Wrong Message

You are circulating in the third week of May. The countdown has been up for a while. The energy in the room is different, and you have been trying to figure out why.

I think about a student I will call Jeremiah. He came from a home with thirteen siblings. Food was not always consistent. Stability was not always consistent. School was where he had a guaranteed meal, a predictable shape to the day, and an adult who knew his name and noticed when something was off. He was not the student bouncing into the room excited about June. He was the student who got quieter as it approached.

When the countdown went up, he started testing limits in ways he had not all year. Nothing dramatic. Late to his seat. Short with peers. Slow to start tasks. None of it looked like anxiety from a distance. All of it was.

The countdown did not do that to him on its own. But it was a daily reminder, posted in numbers that got smaller every morning, that the most reliable thing in his life was ending. Understanding that does not erase the behavior. He still needed to be in his seat. He still needed to do the work. But it changes what you do with the information about why the behavior is happening.

Students rarely say, “I am feeling anticipatory stress about losing this environment.” They say it through calling out, through avoiding tasks that were fine in October, through picking fights with peers they have had no problem with all year. You already know this. The behavior is the language. The question is whether the environment you are building adds to what they already carry, or helps them carry it toward a decent ending.

If the same student starts unraveling every May, another consequence may not be the missing piece. The missing piece may be reading what the transition is doing before it turns into behavior you are managing after the fact.

A countdown that tells students school is something to survive does not just loosen norms. It changes what the room communicates to everyone in it, including the students reading it most carefully.

The Shift: Counting Up What You Built

The reframe is not complicated. It requires being honest about what the countdown is actually for.

“Only eight more days” points away from the room. “Eight more chances to celebrate what this class became” points toward it. Those are not the same message. Students know which one you mean before you finish the sentence.

Instead of “Only five days left,” try “Five more days to finish strong.” Instead of “We’re almost free,” try “We have five days left to close this out right.” Instead of “Survive the last week,” try “Let’s make the last week matter.” Instead of “Countdown to break,” try “Countdown to celebration.” Instead of “Almost out of here,” try “Let’s close this year the way we lived it.”

The goal is to help students move through the ending with structure, connection, and something worth carrying out the door.

How to Design a Countdown That Celebrates

Keep the number small in the room. A daily card, morning slide, or envelope reveal does the job without making the digit the emotional centerpiece of the space. The activity should be bigger than the number.

Anchor each day to purpose. Reflection, gratitude, connection, growth. Days that ask students to name one way they grew, write advice for next year’s students, or offer a genuine compliment to a classmate cannot do something novel on their own. They close the year with meaning, not just momentum.

Keep your routines intact. The closer you get to the final day, the more the structure matters. Morning meetings, cleanup cues, transitions with a predictable shape. For students who need routine to stay regulated, the last two weeks are not the time to let the scaffolding down. The celebration can live inside the routine without replacing it.

A celebration countdown is not permission to let the last ten days become optional. The expectations hold. The structure holds. What changes are you asking students to bring to it?

Be careful with a countdown that students can earn or lose. If the celebration becomes something that can be taken away, it turns into one more pressure point. The student who is already on edge in May does not need a daily reminder that the good thing is fragile.

“Some of us are excited about summer. Some of us might have mixed feelings about the year coming to an end. Both are real, and both are okay in this room.” Thirty seconds. It tells every student who is not excited for June that you know they are there.

Keep your personal countdown personal. Your students do not need to manage your timeline. They need you present for the remaining days.

A Sample 10-Day Celebration Countdown

These are not the ten most important days of the year. There are ten chances to make the ending intentional. Adjust for age, classroom culture, and available time.

Day 10: Memory Day. Students write or draw a favorite moment from this year. Day 9: Gratitude Day. Each student thanks someone who helped them get here. Day 8: Growth Day. Students finish this sentence: “In September I used to ___, but now I ___.” Day 7: Advice Day. What do you want next year’s students in this room to know? Day 6: Connection Day. Students write one sentence naming something a classmate did that made the year easier. Day 5: Reflection Day. What did this year teach you about yourself? Day 4: Legacy Day. Students name one way they helped the class, cleaned up a problem, made someone feel welcome, or left the room better than they found it. Day 3: Compliment Day. Each student writes three specific compliments, and no one has to read any of them out loud. Day 2: Next Step Day. One hope or question for what comes next. Day 1: Goodbye, Well Day. A closing ritual, a letter, a circle. Something that names what the year was.

Three Questions Before You Hang Anything Up

These are not just countdown questions. They belong at the forefront of most classroom practice decisions.

What message does this send? Are we counting toward something or away from something?

Which students in my room might feel this ending differently than I expect?

Does this help my class say goodbye well, or does it just get us through the last few days?

If You’re Going to Count the Days

Countdowns are not automatically harmful. Teachers are allowed to be tired in May. Students are allowed to be excited about summer. None of that is wrong.

But the final days of school are a transition. Joyful for some. Complicated for others. For many students, both at once. The room does not stop shaping kids just because testing is over.

Whether you count down is up to you. But how you build it is a design decision, and that decision communicates something to every student in the room, including the ones reading it most carefully.

The countdown goes up either way. The only question worth asking before it does is which direction it points.

Brad Weinstein is a co-author of the Washington Post Bestseller Hacking School Discipline and works with schools around the world to improve their discipline practices.

References:

Effective School Solutions. (2025, September 18). Understanding and addressing anxiety in teens during school transitions. https://effectiveschoolsolutions.com

The classroom circle may have been introduced to you briefly and without support. Not as a tool. As a philosophy with a talking piece attached.

Someone came in, explained equity, ran you through prompts that felt nothing like your actual classroom, and left. Then the next initiative arrived, and circles disappeared. I have watched this happen in school after school, and I will be honest with you: early on, I was part of that rollout. We brought circles to teachers without enough structure to make them usable, called it professional development, and then wondered why the implementation did not stick. That is on us, not on you.

What I know now, after running these in real buildings with real kids, is that the failure was never the circle. It was the way we handed it over. I have been in enough of those rollouts to know what goes wrong, and I have not always been the one who got it right either. Circles work when they are owned by the teacher using them, not assigned to that teacher by someone who will not be in the room when the room goes sideways.

What follows is not a pitch for restorative practices. It is a description of three circles that reduce friction, lower the temperature before it spikes, and give you a real option in the ten minutes before behavior forces the next one.

You Have Probably Already Seen Circles Go Wrong

Here is the version most schools have lived: a professional development session, a talking piece passed around a circle of adults who are thinking about their next period, a few prompts that sound great in a conference room and land flat in front of twenty-seven eighth graders, and a rollout that lasts until the principal moves on to the next priority. That is not circles failing. That is implementation failing, and those are two completely different problems.

“I already tried it. My kids just used it as an excuse to avoid work.”

I hear some version of this constantly, and it is almost always the same cause. The circle was introduced at a moment of crisis rather than built during ordinary times. You cannot hand students a new structure when the room is already on fire and expect it to hold. The norm has to exist before the moment it is needed, and that is where most teacher-driven attempts break down, too. It is fixable, but not if you skip that part.

Connection Before Content

You circulate at the start of the third period, ready to begin the lesson, and instead, you find a room that is not quite present. Nobody is in crisis, but nobody is quite here either. You could push through and fight for attention you are not going to get, or you could find out what you are actually walking into before you commit to a plan the room cannot support.

That is the argument for circles in one scenario. They give you information before the lesson starts that you would otherwise only get after something goes wrong.

The two objections I hear most often are time and vulnerability. Both are fair. Circles take five to ten minutes when they are run well, and that investment pays back faster than most teachers expect because it replaces the time they were spending on redirection rather than adding to it. The vulnerability problem is a sequencing problem. You do not open with deep prompts. You open with fingers held up, hands on chests, thumbs up or down on sleep. Physical responses. Low stakes. Fast. Students can be honest without being exposed, and the emotional depth comes later, after the structure has earned enough trust to hold it.

The circle also removes the front of the room. No stage. No audience for the performance that sometimes takes over a class when a few students are testing what the space allows. Costello, Wachtel, and Wachtel (2010) found what a lot of experienced teachers already sense without being able to name it: circles used to build inclusion and accountability correlate with character development and improved academic performance, not because they are feel-good exercises, but because students who feel accountable to a room they helped build behave differently in it. A Learning Policy Institute review makes the same implementation point I have made the hard way in real buildings: restorative practices show real promise, but they work best as part of a larger culture shift rather than a single strategy handed to teachers without time, modeling, or support (Klevan, 2021). Which is exactly how most of us got them. Handed over without enough of either.

Circles do not replace consequences. They reduce the number of times you need them, and every teacher I have worked with who figured that out stopped seeing circles as one more thing and started seeing them as the thing that made everything else more manageable.

Three Circles That Are Actually Usable

Welcome Circle

This one happens before the lesson starts, which sounds obvious until you realize how many teachers, myself included, spent years, for longer than I want to admit, starting lessons without any real idea what kind of day the room was having. You could read the energy wrong, launch into a lesson that had no chance, and spend the next forty minutes wondering why nobody was with you. The circle fixes that before it starts.

The quick version does not require conversation. Fingers up for how prepared they feel. Hand on chest if the morning was rough. Thumbs up or down on sleep. Physical, fast, low stakes, done in two minutes. You now know things about your room that you would have discovered the hard way, mid-lesson, when fixing it costs more than two minutes. The longer version is for days when the room needs more time to work. “Talk about a time you wanted to quit but did not.” Four minutes with a talking piece. More trust can be built in those four minutes than in a full unit on community building when the structure is consistent and the prompt is honest. The prompt is not the point. The structure is, and when every student has a moment to be heard before the work starts, they are less likely to take that moment from you in the middle of it.

Start with the physical responses before you ever try the deeper prompts. Students need to trust the structure before they will trust the space with anything that matters to them. Every time.

Closing Circle

This one does two things at once, and most teachers only know about one of them. The obvious thing: it gives students a moment to land before they leave, instead of evaporating out the door mid-thought. Raise your left hand if you accomplished most of what you set out to do today, right hand if you did not. A few students share. The class leaves with something named rather than something trailing off.

The less obvious thing is that you get data. The student who cannot name a win two days running is telling you something worth knowing before tomorrow. The student who raises the wrong hand every single closing circle is showing you a pattern that a grade printout at the end of the quarter will not catch in time. I have learned more about what was actually happening in a classroom from two minutes of closing circle than from a week of exit tickets. In a recent Edutopia feature, a teacher described the closing circle as her favorite part of the day, saying simply, “I can’t imagine teaching without community circles” (Wolfe, 2025). That is not someone who feels burdened by one more thing. That is someone who found a tool that made the rest of the job more manageable.

Reactive Circle

This one is different from the other two, and it matters to understand how before you try to use it. The reactive circle is not a repair circle. You are not processing an incident, holding students accountable to each other, or working toward an action plan. That is a different tool for a different moment, one that requires more structure and more time than this. The reactive circle is for one specific situation: you can feel that something is off in the room, and the lesson will not survive if you ignore it.

You know this feeling. The energy is sideways. Side conversations keep restarting. Someone is technically in their seat but has checked out so completely that you can practically see them somewhere else. Nobody is in crisis, but nobody is quite here either.

Stop. Circle up. Tell them what you are noticing. “Something feels off today, and I want to give us two minutes to get it out before we keep going.”

Pass the talking piece. Let a few students name what is going on, whether it is something that happened at lunch, a test in another class, or just a collective case of a hard Thursday. You are not solving anything. You are acknowledging that the room is human and that you noticed.

I watched a teacher do this after a rough lunch period when the same three students kept whispering, laughing, and pulling the rest of the class off task. She could have started with names on the board, a warning, or a removal. Instead, she paused and said, “We are not ready to learn yet. I can feel it, and I think you can too.” They circled up for three minutes. One student said lunch had been loud and annoying. Another said people were still mad about something from the cafeteria. One student shrugged and said, “Everybody is just doing too much today.” The teacher did not turn it into therapy. She did not let the circle become a debate. She thanked them, restated the expectation, and returned to the lesson.

I want to be clear about what happened next, because I have seen this misread before. The lunch might have been exactly as loud and annoying as they said. That did not make pulling the class sideways for twenty minutes okay, and she did not pretend otherwise. She acknowledged the room and then held the line. Both things happened in the same five minutes. That is the move.

The same students who had been feeding the disruption were not perfect afterward, but they were reachable. Not fixed. Reachable. That is the only difference that matters in that moment, and it is enough to work with. Two minutes, three at most, then reset expectations and resume. The circle does not fix whatever caused the disruption. It gives the room a moment to exhale, and that exhale is often the difference between a period that recovers and one that does not.

The Part That Actually Takes Work

Circles do not run without expectations, and I want to be clear about something: expectations are not the same as rules. Rules tell students what not to do. Expectations tell students what this space requires of them. That difference sounds small until a student tests the boundary and you see which one holds, because rules get argued with and expectations get owned. The expectations have to exist before the circle needs them. “Only speak when you have the talking piece” is useless the first time you say it at 10:47 on a Thursday when the room is already sideways. It has to be a practiced norm, built during calm, before it has to hold under pressure. That is the work, and it has to come first.

What a Circle Is Not

Let me be direct about this because it matters, and because I learned it the hard way.

I was working at an alternative school in Tennessee. A fight had broken out in a classroom, and the rest of the students had witnessed it. I did what I thought was the right move: I circled up the class afterward to process what had happened. The idea was to give everyone a chance to name what they saw, settle the room, and start rebuilding. What happened instead was that students started justifying the fight. Henry, who had watched the whole thing from the back of the room, looked at me with complete sincerity and said, “If someone talks about you, you handle it. That is just how it works.” Nobody pushed back. Nobody had language for what else you could do. And the circle gave every student in that room a forum to publicly agree with him.

I had handed a group of students a structure for open dialogue before they had the skills to use it safely, and I sat there watching the conversation go exactly the wrong direction. That is not a circle problem. That is a sequencing issue; I got the sequence wrong.

That moment taught me something I have not forgotten. A circle is a container. What it holds depends entirely on what the students bring into it. That class did not need a circle that day. They needed direct instruction on how to handle disrespect without resorting to violence, and they needed it in smaller groups where the social pressure of the full room did not amplify every wrong answer. Some conversations belong in a circle. Some belong in a small group. Some belong in a one-on-one. And some need to be taught as a lesson before they can happen in any format. Knowing which is which is the real skill, and a circle used at the wrong moment with the wrong preparation does not just fail. It can make things worse.

A circle is not a consequence replacement. A student who disrupts a circle still has to answer for that. A student who disrespects the talking piece still needs a correction. A student who uses circle time to perform for peers still needs redirection. The circle does not change your expectations. It changes the conditions under which you are managing them, and that is a meaningful difference, but it is not the same as accountability. A feeling of connection does not cancel a behavior. If you are waiting for the community to do the work that a consequence needs to do, you will wait a long time and blame the circle for the outcome.

Here is the version of this I see in schools all the time: a student gets removed from the room every single week and comes back the following Monday with the same short fuse, the same trigger, and the same outcome waiting to happen. Removal handled the moment. It did not change anything that caused it, and the circle cannot fix that either. That is what happens when a consequence gets mistaken for a teaching plan. Neither tool is the problem. The confusion about what each tool is actually for is the problem.

The philosophy that gets stapled to circles is also worth naming, because it is why so many teachers never give them a real try. When circles arrive wrapped in a worldview the teacher never agreed to carry, teachers end up resisting both the tool and the worldview. That is a predictable outcome, not a character flaw. Used as a tool rather than a belief system, a circle is not a replacement for anything. It is what happens in the ten minutes before the harder tools have to do more work than they should.

What the Liberty School Staff Found

When I was delivering professional development at Liberty School in Orland Park, Illinois, I had the staff form circles. Adults who had worked in the same building for years. After the activity, I asked one question: What did you learn about a colleague you did not know before?

Some of it was small. Favorite ice cream. Weekend hobbies. But some of it was not small at all. A group of staff members discovered they all had kids applying to college at the same time. That connection did not come from a staff meeting or a shared Google document. It came from a circle, a talking piece, and two minutes to say something true. If it works for adults who have shared hallways for years, it works for students who are still deciding whether the room is safe enough to actually show up in.

A classroom that never builds that structure is not a neutral place. It is a room where behavior shapes the culture anyway, just without the teacher deciding how. The question is not whether you have time for circles. It is whether you have time for what happens when you skip them, and then whether you have a clear enough picture of what comes next to know which tool to reach for when the circle is not enough. Because it will not always be enough, and knowing that ahead of time is what keeps the tool honest.

That is what we should have said from the beginning, and I am saying it now because we did not.

References

Costello, B., Wachtel, J., and Wachtel, T. (2010). Restorative circles in schools: Building community and enhancing learning. International Institute for Restorative Practices.

Klevan, S. (2021). Building a positive school climate through restorative practices. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/178.861

Wolfe, T. P. (2025, April 25). Using community circles to boost school culture. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-community-circles-to-boost-school-culture/

There is a moment teachers know before they even have words for it.

A student yells, and the whole room changes immediately. Heads turn. A few students freeze. A few lean in. The lesson is still on the board, but nobody is really with it anymore. In a matter of seconds, the room is no longer asking, “What are we learning?” It is asking, “What is the teacher going to do now?”

That is why these moments matter so much.

When a student yells in class, the goal is not just to get the room quiet again. The goal is to steady the room, respond without making the moment bigger, and make it unmistakably clear that the behavior crossed a line. Good discipline has to do all three. It has to protect learning, preserve dignity, and keep accountability intact.

That is not always easy in real time. A loud student can pull an adult into a loud response. A disrespectful moment can make a teacher want to prove a point. And the pressure of all those watching eyes can make even a steady adult react faster than they think. But the next move matters. It shapes what happens next, not just for that student, but for the whole room.

Here are six moves that actually help.

1. Stay calm and collected

The first person you have to manage in a yelling incident is yourself.

That is not because the student is not responsible. They are. It is because your response is going to shape the next thirty seconds more than anything else in the room. Students read our faces, our pace, our tone, and our body language before they process most of our words. If we lose our footing, the moment usually gets harder to recover.

This is where discipline often falls apart. Many adults were taught that authority means volume, force, or public dominance. In reality, a reactive adult usually adds energy to a moment that already has too much of it. The student feels more threatened. The class feels more tension. And what could have been a brief disruption starts turning into a battle neither side is really thinking clearly in.

This is where the neuroscience matters in a practical way. When a student is highly activated, reasoning gets weaker. Impulse control gets weaker. The ability to reflect narrows fast. Language-heavy correction usually lands poorly in that state because the student is not in a strong place to take it in. The same thing can happen to adults when frustration takes over. In moments like this, the best thinking in the room often belongs to the person who can stay the most grounded.

A child’s dysregulation calls for adult calm, not adult chaos.

That is not softness. That is steadiness. It means the adult is grounded enough to respond on purpose instead of reacting out of frustration. It means lowering the heat instead of adding to it. It means holding the boundary clearly without letting the moment pull you into anger, embarrassment, or a power struggle.

Take a breath. Slow your pace. Lower your volume instead of raising it. Keep your face steady. Say only what needs to be said. Those choices matter more than people realize

2. Address the behavior calmly and assertively

Once you are steady enough to respond well, address the behavior calmly and assertively.

Do not sidestep it, and do not escalate it. A student yelling in class cannot become something adults pretend not to notice. Students need clear boundaries, especially in heated moments. The room does too. At the same time, the correction should not become its own performance.

A strong response can still be respectful. You can say something like, “You can be upset, but you cannot yell across this room. We are going to handle this differently.” That kind of correction does two things at once. It names the behavior, and it holds the line. It tells the student that their feelings may be real, but their current choice is not acceptable.

That distinction matters because the second a student feels publicly embarrassed, the original issue often gets tangled up with pride. Now the moment is not just about yelling. Now it is about image. Now it is about who is going to blink first.

That is how a behavior moment turns into a showdown.

Most teachers have lived that feeling. You can sense the room waiting to see whether this becomes a correction or a scene. The goal is not to dominate the student. The goal is to interrupt the behavior, keep your footing, and make the boundary clear without making the student feel like the only way out is to dig in deeper. Students still need to do what is asked. They still need to know the room has expectations. But a teacher can be firm without becoming demeaning, and that difference matters more than people think.

3. Separate the trigger from the reaction

Once the room is stable and the student is calm enough to talk, that is when the deeper work begins.

Because yelling is rarely just about the noise.

Sometimes it is frustration over work. Sometimes it is embarrassment in front of peers. Sometimes it is a conflict that started before the student even walked into class. Sometimes it is a student who was already near their limit and finally spilled over. Students often know they were upset. They do not always fully understand what happened in the seconds before the outburst.

None of that makes the behavior okay. It does make the behavior understandable.

That matters because too many discipline conversations stop at the surface. The adult addresses the outburst, assigns a consequence, and moves on without ever learning what pushed the student there. That may stop the noise for ten minutes, but it usually does not change the pattern.

This is why private conversation matters. Ask what happened. Ask what they were feeling right before they yelled. Ask what made the moment feel so big. Listen closely enough to separate the trigger from the reaction.

A student can be responsible for the reaction and still need help understanding the trigger.

That is where empathy belongs. Not as an excuse. As information. Adults make better discipline decisions when they understand the behavior they are responding to. A teacher who only responds to the volume is making decisions with half the picture.

If you want to change the pattern, you have to understand what keeps setting it off.

4. Build a better next move

Once you understand what drove the outburst, the next question is simple. What is this student supposed to do next time instead?

That is where discipline has to move beyond correction and into teaching. Telling a student, “Do not do that again,” may feel satisfying in the moment, but it does not build much. Most students need more than a warning. They need another path. When that same frustration, embarrassment, or anger shows up tomorrow, what are they supposed to do with it?

This is where a lot of discipline breaks down. Adults are very good at naming what students should stop doing. We are not always as good at teaching what they should do instead. A student cannot reliably reach for a better response they have never practiced, named, or processed.

That is why collaborative problem-solving matters. Work with the student to build a practical plan. Maybe they need a break signal. Maybe they need a way to ask for help before they hit overload. Maybe they need language for saying, “I am getting frustrated,” without throwing the whole room off course. Maybe they need support repairing a peer issue that keeps lighting the fuse.

Many students cannot change a behavior they have never had the chance to process with an adult.

That is why this step matters so much. Students are far more likely to use a plan they helped build than a lecture they were forced to hear. From a restorative lens, that matters because the goal is not just stopping the behavior. The goal is helping the student take ownership of what happened and participate in doing better next time.

Discipline should leave a student with more than a consequence. It should leave them with a next move.

5. Hold the line on accountability

This is where adults need to be especially clear.

The moment a conversation includes regulation, triggers, or student voice, some people worry the student is about to slip out of accountability. That should not happen.

A student who yells in class still needs to be held responsible. They disrupted learning. They affected their peers. They crossed a clear boundary. Understanding the why does not cancel out the what. It should sharpen the response, not remove it.

Once the student is regulated enough to hear it, circle back to the expectation. Be plain. Be steady. Be clear that yelling is not acceptable in the classroom, no matter how upset the student felt. Then move into what needs to happen next.

That next step depends on the situation. It might be an apology. It might be repairing the disruption in a concrete way. It might be practicing what the student should say or do instead next time. It might be a call home. It might be a formal consequence. The response should fit the moment, but it should always connect behavior to impact.

That is what makes accountability meaningful. A consequence that only communicates power may get compliance. A response tied to impact, reflection, and repair has a much better chance of actually teaching. Students need to know their actions carry weight. They also need to know discipline is not random, personal, or performative. It is a response to behavior, and it is meant to move them toward better behavior.

Silencing behavior in the moment doesn’t prevent it from happening next time.

That is why accountability has to do more than shut a moment down. It has to help a student understand what happened, who it affected, and what needs to be different the next time they are tested.

6. Protect the relationship after the dust settles

Some of the most important discipline work happens after the incident is over.

Follow up.

That does not erase the consequence. It does not soften the line. It does not undo the correction. It tells the student that the behavior was addressed, but the relationship is still standing.

That matters because shame is a terrible teacher. Students who feel written off often settle more deeply into the very patterns adults are trying to change. Students who feel corrected but still seen are much more likely to stay in relationship long enough to learn something from the moment.

This is where restorative discipline gets misunderstood. It is not about acting like behavior does not matter. It is about understanding that students learn best when the adult is steady enough to hold both truth and relationship at the same time. The truth is the behavior was not okay. The relationship says this does not have to define you.

A brief check-in later that day can matter. A short conversation the next morning can matter. Even a calm, genuine “How are you doing now?” can matter. Those moments rebuild the bridge back to learning.

Students are more willing to accept hard feedback from adults they trust. That does not prevent every outburst, but it does make restoration more possible after one.

The relationship is not the reward for good behavior. It is the foundation that makes growth possible after hard behavior.

The takeaway

When a student yells in class, the work is bigger than getting the room quiet.

We have to steady ourselves, name the behavior clearly, understand what was driving it, help the student build a better next move, hold the line on accountability, and follow up afterward. That is what real discipline looks like. It is not permissive. It is not passive. And it is not about explaining behavior away.

Real discipline is not just about stopping behavior. It is about changing the pattern behind it.

That is the bigger work. Not just ending the outburst. Not just getting through the period. Not just reclaiming the room for a few minutes. The deeper work is helping students understand themselves, repair what happened, and build a better response for next time.

Any adult can force a moment of silence.

Stronger discipline leaves the student more able to handle the next hard moment than they were before.

More Resources

Want to explore this approach further? Check out my book, Hacking School Discipline, where we rethink student behavior by shifting from traditional punishment to restorative practices that foster relationships and accountability.

Want to connect more with other educators navigating behavior and discipline in their schools? Join the Navigating Discipline Facebook Group!

Two students stole candy from their teacher. Not just any candy—the candy. The kind of candy that teachers use to build engagement, reward effort, and inject a little joy into learning.

The teacher had bought it with his own money, excited to use it as part of a review game and classroom activities. But before that could happen, two students took matters into their own hands.

One distracted the teacher. The other slipped behind his desk and grabbed the stash. Later, in the next class period, the student handed it out like a sugar-fueled Robin Hood, making himself the instant favorite among his classmates.

His logic? If everyone was happy, where was the harm?

But there was a problem: it wasn’t theirs to give.

When the Teacher Found Out…

Later that day, the teacher noticed something odd—students were munching on candy. His candy. The same kind he had just bought. After putting the pieces together, he figured out what had happened.

Now, at this moment, most teachers would go one of two ways:

1. Go straight to punishment – Write them up, give them detention, call home, and move on.

2. Drop the whole thing – Decide it’s “just candy” and let it go.

This teacher chose a third way: restorative accountability.

Instead of focusing on what rule was broken, he focused on what harm was done. Instead of jumping straight to consequences, he asked for a restorative conversation.

Facing the Truth

When I sat down with the students, I didn’t start with shame or anger. I just asked:

“What happened?”

They admitted to it pretty quickly. But here’s the twist—they didn’t think it was a big deal.

“We gave the candy out. Everyone was happy.”

In their minds, no one was hurt. The candy was shared. The class was in a better mood. So why did it matter?

That’s when I knew we had some work to do.

From Candy to Bank Robbery

To help them see the bigger picture, I used an analogy:

“Imagine someone robs a bank, then goes out and hands the money to random people on the street. Sure, those people might be happy—but does that make it right?”

That clicked.

I asked them again: “Who was affected by what you did?”

At first, they struggled. They only saw the immediate outcome—the happy classmates. They hadn’t thought beyond that.

So, we shifted the focus to the teacher.

• He was excited to do something fun for his students.

• He used his own money to buy something special.

• He lost trust in his students because of this.

• He felt disappointed and hesitant to do fun things in the future.

That’s when it hit them. The theft wasn’t just about candy—it was about trust.

One student finally said, “So… he probably doesn’t want to do rewards anymore.”

Bingo.

This was the moment where they had to make a choice: own up, or brush it off. True accountability isn’t just about saying sorry—it’s about having the courage to face the harm you’ve caused and take steps to repair it.

Repairing the Harm

I asked, “How do you fix this?”

At first, one student asked, “How much did the candy cost? I’ll pay him back.”

But the teacher made it clear—it wasn’t about the money.

“You can’t buy back trust. You have to earn it.”

That hit them hard. They realized their mistake—not just because they got caught, but because they could see the real impact of their actions. That’s accountability.

Without being told to, they chose to apologize. Not because they were forced to. Not because they wanted to avoid punishment. But because they truly understood the harm they had caused.

And more importantly, they learned how to repair it.

Why This Matters

Could the teacher have just written them up? Sure.

Would that have taught them a lesson? Maybe.

Would it have restored trust? Not a chance.

This is why restorative discipline matters. It doesn’t mean “letting kids off easy.” It means holding them accountable in a way that actually changes behavior—not just for today, but for the future.

Real discipline isn’t about consequences. It’s about accountability, growth, and repair.

And sometimes, the best lesson starts with a stolen piece of candy.

Final Thoughts

• Punishment teaches compliance.

• Accountability teaches responsibility.

• Restorative conversations build trust.

Next time a student makes a mistake, ask yourself: Do I want to punish, or do I want to teach?

Because if we want students to learn from their mistakes, we have to give them the tools to actually fix them.

More Resources

Want to explore this approach further? Check out my book, Hacking School Discipline, where we rethink student behavior by shifting from traditional punishment to restorative practices that foster relationships and accountability.

You ever feel like a broken record?

Like you’ve had the same conversation with the same students a million times, but they just don’t get it?

That was me. Two boys in my school had been pushing limits all year—horseplaying, roughhousing, testing boundaries. And then one day, in the middle of passing period, they took it too far.

They were wrestling. On the ground. Right as a class of younger students walked by.

The second I saw it, I felt the frustration rise. I’d already talked to them about this. We’d been over it. They knew better.

I wanted to lay down the law. Give them a consequence they’d remember. Show them that enough was enough.

But here’s the problem: When we give consequences while we’re angry, we’re not thinking. We’re reacting.

And reacting rarely changes behavior.

Why Giving Consequences in the Heat of the Moment Is a Bad Idea

Let’s break it down.

When we’re angry, our brains aren’t in a logical, problem-solving state. Our amygdala—the part of the brain that controls emotional responses—takes over, hijacking our ability to think rationally.

Students feel that energy. If we come down hard while we’re upset, they don’t hear the lesson—we just sound like another adult on a power trip.

Instead of reflecting on their choices, they’re thinking:

• This isn’t fair.

• Why is she so mad?

• I wasn’t even trying to hurt anyone.

And here’s the kicker—if a consequence feels unfair or reactive, students don’t take ownership. They don’t learn. They just get better at avoiding getting caught next time.

Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading expert in neuroscience and trauma-informed practices, puts it best:

“A dysregulated adult cannot regulate a dysregulated child.”

If we want kids to learn self-control, we have to model it first. Our ability to stay calm directly impacts their ability to do the same.

So instead of dishing out a punishment I’d regret, I did something different.

I walked away.

Not forever. Just for ten minutes.

I gave myself time to reset so I could lead with logic—not emotion.

How the Conversation Went Instead

Once I had cooled down, I pulled the boys aside.

I didn’t jump straight to consequences. I started with questions:

• What was going on?

• Why were you wrestling in the hallway?

• Do you understand how this impacted the younger students who saw it?

At first, they brushed it off. “We were just playing.” “We didn’t know anyone was watching.”

I get it. They weren’t trying to scare anyone. But intent doesn’t erase impact.

So we talked. About how their actions affected others. About how their teacher now had to take class time to address the confusion. About how they’re old enough to make better choices.

Then I asked: What do you think is fair?

One of them suggested they have an escort for bathroom breaks to make sure they stayed on track. I asked for how long, and he said a week.

And here’s why that mattered—because he came up with the consequence himself.

I didn’t force it. I didn’t impose my authority. He took ownership. And when students take ownership, they’re way more likely to actually change their behavior.

Then we tackled the real issue: repairing the harm.

At first, they pushed back. “We didn’t mean to scare anyone.”

But meaning to or not, harm happened. So we talked about how they could make things right with the younger students and their teacher.

This is what accountability looks like. Not just punishment, but repairing harm.

What Would Have Happened If I’d Given a Punishment Right Away?

Let’s be real—I could have hit them with an automatic detention. I could have taken away privileges or sent them home.

Would they have been more careful next time? Maybe.

But would they have actually learned anything? Probably not.

Would they have taken responsibility for their actions? Nope.

Would they have felt more connected to their school community? Definitely not.

They might have changed their behavior—but not for the right reasons. They wouldn’t have grown, just learned to avoid getting in trouble.

That’s why how we respond to behavior matters. If we want students to change, we have to focus on teaching, not punishing.

What You Can Do Instead

The next time you feel yourself getting frustrated, here’s what to do:

1. Pause before you react. If you’re mad, step away. Give yourself time to cool down so you can lead with logic, not emotion.

2. Start with questions. Instead of jumping to consequences, guide students through reflection. Help them understand the impact of their choices.

3. Make sure they take ownership. Ask them what they think is fair. When students help decide their consequences, they’re more likely to follow through.

4. Don’t forget to repair harm. Even if they didn’t mean to cause harm, it still happened. Accountability isn’t just about consequences—it’s about making things right.

5. Model self-regulation. If we want students to stay calm and think before they act, we have to show them how it’s done.

Final Thought: Be the Adult They Need

Students don’t need us to be perfect. But they do need us to be the calm in their storm.

When we’re frustrated, we have two choices:

• React in anger and create fear.

• Respond with patience and create growth.

If we want kids to regulate their emotions, we have to regulate ours first.

So the next time you’re about to hand out a consequence in the heat of the moment—pause.

Take a breath. Reset.

Because the best discipline isn’t about control.

It’s about connection.

And that’s how real change happens.

This article is by Brad Weinstein, co-author of the Washington Post Bestseller Hacking School Discipline. He works with schools around the world to improve their discipline practices.

Restorative practices have been increasing over the last decade, but some schools remain hesitant to implement them. I believe this is due to misconceptions about restorative practices in the classroom.

Being restorative isn’t…

• Just a conversation

• An easy way out

• Without consequences

On the flip side, being restorative also isn’t…

• Punitive

• Based on illogical consequences

• A one-and-done event

Restorative practices are not an easy way out. While it’s true that conversations occur, they dig deep into the “why” behind behaviors. Simply punishing a student without meaningful dialogue—or with a one-sided conversation—does not lead to lasting change.

Students must understand why their behavior was wrong, build empathy for those affected, and repair the harm they caused.

Consider the following scenarios for the same behavior: a student throwing food in the cafeteria.

Scenario 1 (traditional punishment): The student is sent to the office, where the principal sternly tells them that throwing food is inappropriate and assigns detention as punishment. Result? The student might not repeat the behavior—or they might simply learn not to get caught.

Scenario 2 (restorative practices): The student is sent to the office, where the custodian and a cafeteria worker join an administrator in a circle. The administrator welcomes everyone and begins by asking the student why they threw the food. The student explains they were trying to be funny for their friends. When asked who might be impacted, the student guesses that those cleaning it up might be affected.

The custodian then shares how he spends his day keeping the school clean for students and staff and how extra messes disrupt his work. If he has to stay late, he might lose time with his family. The cafeteria worker adds that she prepares food for hundreds of students daily. Knowing that some students rely on school meals as their main food source, she worries that food waste could upset those students and hurt the respectful environment they work hard to maintain.

The student, realizing the broader impact, apologizes. The administrator then asks what the student can do to make things right, and the student offers to help clean the cafeteria the next day. Everyone agrees this will repair the harm, and the meeting concludes.

Some may see time as a barrier to restorative practices, and that’s understandable. However, in this process, we’ve helped the student develop empathy and respect, which significantly reduces the chance they’ll repeat this behavior.

Brad Weinstein is a co-author of the Washington Post Bestseller Hacking School Discipline and works with schools around the world to improve their discipline practices.