Kohn's theory

Alfie Cohn's Beyond Discipline Theory focuses on teaching that promotes thinking, decision-making, and consideration for others. It emphasizes creating a sense of community in the classroom, involving students in problem-solving, and removing excessive control from teachers. The theory argues that coercive discipline does more harm than good and that students develop self-control and responsibility when trusted. It contributed to education by highlighting the limitations of coercive discipline and popularizing the concept of classroom community. Cohn suggests involving students in curriculum discussions and structuring lessons based on their interests. The theory also encourages students to solve their own problems and participate in setting classroom rules and responsibilities. So, we looked at Alfie Cohn's Beyond Discipline Theory. It has a big focus on teaching that promotes thinking, decision-making, and consideration for others. It focuses on having a sense of community in the classroom with shared responsibility for all, and it also focuses on involving students in resolving classroom problems. It removes too much control from the teacher. The logic behind this theory is that coercive discipline has no place in enlightened teaching because it does more harm than good, and that students develop self-control and responsibility when they're trusted. Contributions to education are that it showed how coercive discipline limits development of caring humans and popularized the concept of classroom community with equal participation from everyone, and it also contributed guidance for teachers on making the classroom more of a community. Cohn suggests that you should seriously involve students in discussing curriculum, procedures, and class problems, and you should organize your curriculum in a way that caters to student interests and promotes in-depth thinking. He basically says that you should always ask, how can my students help decide on this matter? The images on this slide are – on the right is a step-by-step problem-solve. It gives students a way to try to think through solving problems in the classroom so that it's not all about the teacher solving them for you. It's about them being able to figure out how to solve their own problems. The bottom left corner is a template for class rules, and the bottom says, we agree to follow the rules assigned the class, and this is cool because it makes it to where the students can help at the beginning of the year set up some rules about what they think should be the classroom rules instead of just a teacher on the first day of school telling the students what the rules are for the classroom. And then on the bottom right is class jobs, and I thought that this was something that this theory reminded me of because it helps the students feel like they have a role in the classroom and that they can help out in their classroom and they're not just there to learn. They're there to help.