A Series of Misalignments: Teachers’ Sensemaking of Classroom Discipline

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 15: Education and Inequality

Abstract

Schools have long used exclusionary punishment, like suspensions and expulsions, to respond to student misbehavior. School discipline reform efforts of the last decade led to policy, cultural, and practical shifts in the enactment of school discipline. In 2014, the Obama administration issued guidance for schools to shift away from punitive approaches to school discipline. Over subsequent years, many states and districts adopted policies that limited their schools’ use of suspensions and expulsions in favor of non-punitive alternatives like positive behavioral interventions and supports and restorative justice (Alexander et al. 2023). In aggregate, these reforms have had considerable success, driving statistically and practically meaningful reductions in national suspension rates since their peak in 2010 (Hwang et al. 2022; Leung-Gagné et al. 2022). Yet, alongside falling rates of formal discipline, qualitative evidence suggests a contemporaneous rise in informal exclusionary school discipline practices, which remove children from their learning environments but largely escape formal record-keeping (Steyer et al. 2025).In more recent years, educators and news outlets have raised alarm about growing concerns of “behavior problems” after the COVID school closures, alternatives to punitive discipline like restorative practices have faced political pushback, and states have passed new disciplinary policies like phone-free schools. It is within this context that we ask: how do educators make sense of their approach to classroom management?

Authors

• Rebecca Gleit, Skidmore College

• Hannah Schlosberg, Skidmore College

• Chant Tang, Skidmore College

• Kyky Vongsouvanh, Skidmore College