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Book information:

DISCIPLINE FOR HOME AND SCHOOL

by Ed Ford

Contents, Foreword, and What This Book Is All About

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ... vii

Introduction by John Champlin ... xi

Foreword by William T. Powers ... xiii

1. What This Book Is All About ... 1

2. A Simple Understanding

of Perceptual Control Theory ... 7

3. What Is Discipline? ... 13

4. When Should Discipline Be Used? ... 15

5. Establishing Discipline ... 17

6. When Are Children Willing to Learn Discipline? ... 21

7. Setting Rules and Standards ... 29

8. What Should Happen

When Children Break Rules? ... 33

9. Techniques for Getting Children to Think ... 43

10. When Children Want to Solve Their Problems ... 53

11. Dealing with Children

Who Continually Break Rules ... 65

12. Knowing Your Limitations ... 73

13. Keeping the Program Alive ... 77

14. Dealing with Objections ... 83

15. Thoughts from Educators Who Helped Implement

This Discipline Program ... 89

A Personal Afterword ... 99

Appendix 1. Teaching Responsible Thinking Card ... 101

Appendix 2. Perceptual Control Theory Resources ... 103

FOREWORD

If you just listen to the words used in this book, you might get an uncomfortable feeling about Ed Ford's recommendations and insights. Discipline, establishing rules, obedience, making commitments, responsibility--to anyone who has gone through conventional school systems as a student, these words have a familiar and threatening ring: they mean shape up!

But you will do well to hear more than just these words. Behind them is a theory called perceptual control theory, or PCT, but even more important, behind them is Ed Ford and many years of experience dealing successfully with people who have problems. New psychological theories promise radical changes in the way people deal with each other, particularly with problems between people. In the hands of ivory-tower academics or fanatics, they can quickly lead to disaster. The reason is the very newness of the theories, newness that means the need for a long period of testing and correcting before errors have been found and removed. The only real test for a theory about human nature is in the real world, where conditions are not controlled and the "experimental subjects" have no idea how they are supposed to behave, except what their own natures tell them. That is the world of Ed Ford, and the world in which he is applying--with a strong sense of the possible--the principles of perceptual control theory.

The real trick in applying a new theory like PCT to real people in real situations is to know what is possible to change and what is better left the way it is until we know more. The changes that Ed outlines in this book are all possible to make. Ed has shown people how to make them, and where they have been put into effect, the results have been enthusiastically received. Yet there are few radical changes here; the effects of the theory are seen mostly as shifts in attitude, changes in the kind of respect that people show for each other, a lessening of coercion and control that naturally occurs as human nature itself becomes better understood.

Paradoxically, perceptual "control" theory is not about how to control people better; it is about the inborn nature of human beings as independent organisms who control themselves, who are inherently in charge of what happens to themselves. This view of human nature is quite different from traditional ideas still influential in society, which teach that human behavior is caused by everything but the person doing the behaving. A word like "discipline" takes on an entirely new meaning when you start from the premise that only the individual can exert discipline--that is, use internal principles and rules as a guide for living. This is not one person trying to force another into behaving right. It is an individual trying to make personal sense of standards, goals, and relationships with other people. Achieving discipline in the classroom is no longer a question of cowing children into sitting quietly in rows; it is a question of communicating to children their own power to make choices and decisions, to pick workable goals and achieve them, to find a reasonable and pleasant way to live with others--who are also independent, self-disciplined beings.

The implications of PCT in terms of self-understanding and understanding society are potentially immense. But they are also largely unexplored. It would be very easy to jump to extreme conclusions, to interpret the meaning of PCT as supporting either a stodgy status quo or a radical descent into license and anarchy. This is why Ed Ford's approach is so important. In any part of our society, there is already a social system in place, with its rules and customs, its institutions and laws. It is there because it works--maybe not always very well, maybe not to everyone's benefit, but certainly better than nature red in tooth and claw. Ed Ford knows very well where we are, and that to get anywhere else we must start here.

When we tinker with this system, we know not what we do. A new theory is no excuse for taking an axe to the whole structure of the school system, or the social system in general. What must be done is to look for the aspects of the system that clearly need change, and that clearly can be changed without destroying everything. The insights of PCT can be applied non-destructively to key human relationships that are not working the way we want them to work. We can leave everything else the way it is--until we understand what to do next.

This is how Ed Ford works. In this book you will find many conventional ideas and methods, but every time Ed speaks of them, you will see that they are approached from a new direction, with a new attitude that makes all the difference. Pay attention to the difference; it is what makes this approach both effective and practical.

William T. Powers

Durango, Colorado

April 24, 1994

CHAPTER 1

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ALL ABOUT

In recent years I have spent much time working with parents, teachers, counselors, and school administrators across the United States. I have found in school after school and home after home that there is a desperate need for an efficient and workable discipline program. The reason is obvious. Children are growing up without the social skills they need. Many of them lack the ability to cooperate with their parents, teachers, and peers. They haven't learned to obey rules. And they haven't learned to discipline _themselves_--this means setting their own rules and standards, setting measurable and objective goals, and creating for themselves an orderly way of life so that they can accomplish their own goals in an efficient way. To achieve this, they must first learn through experience to obey the established rules and standards of the environments in which they find themselves everyday.

This requires something new: help with social skills for children who have the need and are willing to learn, teaching them how to respect the rights of others, how to get along with their peers, how to make effective plans for studying and self-discipline, how to understand the purpose of rules, and how to work with adults in a cooperative atmosphere. In short, teaching children _responsible thinking_.

The reasons for the rise in disruptive behavior at home and in schools are fairly obvious. Excessive television has deprived children of the time in which they most naturally develop, through play activity, the social skills that they need for getting along with others. It is in creative play that they learn how to set limits, negotiate, compromise, and respect each other's rights. And in the school years, much of their after-school play time is regulated and controlled, with rules set and supervision established by their parents or coaches. _They haven't spent enough time learning how to get along with others through play on their own_. It is rare today to see children organizing themselves in activities in which they can develop an ability to get along with others and learn respect for the rights of others.

The fact that children have to _learn_ the skills of getting along with others implies the need for some creative thinking on their part. This kind of thinking is rarely taught. Instead, children are treated with drugs, manipulated, punished, or subjected to other forms of intervention. In most cases, adults decide what happens to them.

A number of years ago, I worked as a consultant at the Adobe Mountain Juvenile Correction Facility just north of Phoenix, one of Arizona's maximum security facilities for juveniles. My job was to train case managers and security officers how to deal with the young offenders. I was assigned to two units. In one unit, no one was really interested in what I had to offer. In the other unit, I found one officer and one case manager who wanted to learn from me. So I went to the superintendent and suggested several alternatives: he could cancel my contract, I could work on a limited basis, or I could look for case managers in other units at the facility who might be interested in what I had to offer. He insisted that I stay and look for interested staff. I found some. I offered some general workshops for the entire staff at the facility, and then I started working directly with the juveniles in the units, with the counselors and officers watching how I interacted with their charges.

I found that, to a person, when I asked the juveniles what they wanted to work on that would help them get out of lock-up, their inability to control their anger was their major concern. I would ask them what happened the last time they got upset, and invariably they would say that they had "punched someone out." I would ask, "Is there anyone you know who does something different?" "Yeah," they would reply, "Thomas goes to his room when he gets upset." "And what does he do there?" "He writes poems." "What do you think of how he handles his anger?" "Well, he doesn't go to lock-up, and he'll get out of here quicker than I will," came the reply. I taught them how to work out plans for themselves to help deal more effectively with their anger. Some chose to go to their cells and read when upset, others chose to sleep, and still others chose to do push-ups. One young man dealt with his anger problem by "taking a mile-and-a-half walk" in his cell (his cell was 10 feet wide; he walked back-and-forth across it enough times to cover a mile and a half). He said that by walking, he became calm again.

Before I arrived, teaching responsible thinking was rarely attempted with these juveniles. When I attended diagnostic meetings at the facility, the personnel sat around discussing an offender's record and what they thought ought to be done with him. During staff meetings, where the juvenile was confronted by those who dealt with him on a daily basis, often he was verbally attacked and criticized; when he would try to defend himself, they would often ignore him. In schools and at home, I've often found the same thing. Children are tested, put on various types of medication, diagnosed, sent to various types of groups and programs, and classified, but only rarely are they taught to think things through on their own, to deal with what they see as important to them--what _they_ want to work on.

Children are suspended in-school and "grounded" at home, they are given detention, they are lectured to, and they are yelled at and criticized--all of this supposedly to produce children who think creatively and responsibly about how they should handle themselves when faced with social problems. But the only thing that these kinds of punishment teach children is how to punish. And so students get back at the system through vandalism and disruption and acting out. Only rarely does anyone sit down and find out what the children want and whether they want to work at making their lives better.

In this book, I have put together some ideas on discipline that have _worked_ in the schools and with families where they have been tried. That doesn't mean that what I have written about cannot be improved. I hope that others will build upon what I have suggested here. Some schools where I have worked have already done so, adding practical applications of their own. No one has all the answers. We are all trying to help each other in a very difficult task.

My program is based on the work of William T. Powers, whose perceptual control theory (PCT) models have been amply documented in the scientific literature (see references in Appendix 2). PCT offers a completely new approach to discipline. Asking children what they want, how they perceive things, and whether what they're doing is helping them to achieve all of their goals, then _offering them choices_ are the steps to treating children as _living control systems_ about whom we care and in whom we believe--living control systems who must learn to think and act responsibly when interacting with other living control systems in order to be able to achieve _their own_ goals.

Perceptual control theory teaches that all humans are trying to achieve their own internally specified goals; they do so by manipulating the world of their perceptions until those perceptions are what they want. This is not done in a vacuum--it is done mostly around others. If, while attempting to control my own perceptual world, I limit someone else from doing the same thing, then I violate the rights of another human being.

Trying to teach children (as living control systems) to control what happens to them without interfering with the rights of other living control systems to do the same is sometimes viewed as trying to control the children. But there is a big difference between trying to control what happens to another person and asking that person what choice they prefer among the options they currently have. It is respecting their right to control their own destiny that makes the difference.

It is essential that children be given the choice _when they are ready to reconcile their problems, not when parents or teachers think they are ready_. If a child is sent to a restricted area and then is not allowed to be reconciled when she is ready, providing that her teacher or parent is free at that moment to deal with her, then the restriction could be perceived by her as punitive, since she is ready and no one wants to talk with her. If she is asked to reconcile before she is ready to accept responsibility, then she will most likely become disruptive again and develop a sense of failure, since she has not yet made any commitment to resolve her problems. The child needs to be allowed to control her destiny within the reality of the environment in which she finds herself. That will allow her the maximum opportunity to learn to control her own world.

The more understanding parents and school personnel have of how we

all think, act, and function as living control systems, the greater

are the chances for children to succeed, that is, to achieve their

own goals in ways that do not interfere with the success of others.

So I begin with an introduction to perceptual control theory.