Jack Hasselbring, a music teacher who attended one of our recent discipline seminars, commented, "I really value your ideas on discipline, especially during a very tough first year of teaching at an inner-city school. I was given your book and a taped seminar of yours, and it saved my career." At the same seminar, a young lady asked us, "I've heard of Discipline with Dignity, but I do not know what it is. Can you tell me?" Between these two incidents lies the reason for this newly revised edition of our book Discipline with Dignity.

This special edition of Discipline with Dignity is a thank-you to the thousands of educators who have gratified us by learning and using the concepts and strategies from the first two editions to benefit students and make their schools better places. Unlike the second edition, in which we added a new introduction but kept the original book intact, this edition offers new insights, concepts, and many updated strategies and interventions to help educators facing the greater challenges of today's youth.

It is not easy to give a simple answer to the question "What is Discipline with Dignity?"

• It is not only a program.
• It is not just a solution.
• It has a structure that can apply to all situations, but it is not a standardized formula.
• It does not change children to be somebody else. It makes them better at who they already are.

We define this approach as a set of values on which interventions, strategies, and constructs are built to help children make informed choices to improve their behavior and to make life better for teachers. When that happens, children are so much more likely to learn the content we want to teach, understand why they need to learn it, and comprehend how to use it in constructive ways to improve their lives and the lives of others.

Much of what we introduced in the first publication of this book was considered radical then but is now accepted as good practice by most educators. The ideas of students helping develop rules and having a say in choosing a consequence are examples. Defining discipline as teaching responsibility rather than simply demanding obedience is another. In fact, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the number and variety of programs that have adapted, borrowed, and used the Discipline with Dignity model, structure, and techniques honor us.

Yet much has changed since that first publication. Who could have guessed that so many students would be victimized by violence and bullying, some rationally fearing for their lives? How many would have predicted that the airwaves would be filled with hate-mongering language and musical lyrics that make hardened inner-city students sound like choirboys? Was there any way to have known that students could photograph their tests and send them in a nanosecond to their friends on cell phones or that the buzz and distraction of students texting each other would be a common fixture in every school? It is equally doubtful that most teachers would have thought that nearly every class would be filled with a group of students of wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and emotional diversity. Now part of the fabric of education, inclusion is here to stay.

A year after the second edition of Discipline with Dignity (Curwin & Mendler, 1999a), the word Columbine became a household name. Incidents like the shooting at that Colorado school changed the way we understood school safety and increased the responsibility to both protect and connect with all students. Because of Columbine and other school shootings, district and school policies were created much out of fear and desperation. "Zero tolerance" became the catchword against certain acts deemed inappropriate. While the idea (safety) behind zero tolerance was primarily good, many of these policies have limited the effectiveness of teachers and administrators. Although policies can provide guidance, when zero tolerance is used to expel a kindergarten student for having an aspirin bottle, all must agree that the policy has gone too far. Many educators are frustrated by the number of policies they are required to follow on a daily basis.

Discipline with Dignity is predicated on the fact that one size does not fit all. Teachers need flexibility to use their judgment. We suggest a program in which being fair does not mean having to treat everyone exactly the same way. Do we want our students to have "zero tolerance" for each other when in an argument on the playground, on the bus, or in the lunchroom?

Envision is a charter school project consisting of four schools in the Bay Area that serve primarily low-income urban youth. Its practices represent much of what we recommend in this book. Envision emphasizes community building, real learning, high expectations, and treating everyone with dignity. A major incident occurred the day before we made our visit to one of the schools, the Impact Academy in Hayward, California, that illustrates how our understanding of children's lives has changed.

On that morning, two gunmen stole a car and were attempting armed robberies near the school. While in pursuit of the gunmen, the police mistook a 14-year-old student of the school for one of them. Dwayne, a charming, warm, and easygoing young man, was shoved to the ground and handcuffed. Six police officers aimed their weapons at him and demanded that he not move. Jen Davis Wickens, the superb school principal, saw this incident and ran out to tell the police that they had the wrong person, but the officers held Dwayne on the ground for about another half hour before releasing him. One might expect Dwayne to have been upset and angry, but instead he said, "I'm not mad. This happens in my neighborhood all the time." Although we are grateful for the diligence of the police in making a split-second decision that might have prevented an armed criminal from getting loose in the school, the possibility of racial profiling and the officers' refusal to immediately release Dwayne are very bothersome.

In a community meeting, Jen Davis Wickens asked how many other students had experienced being wrongly accused. Far too many indicated an affirmative answer. For most educators, this is hard to imagine. Few of us have ever been wrongly accused of a crime or had six guns pointed at our heads. After an incident like this, is it even possible to get back to teaching and learning math and science?

So many nonschool factors affect student behavior, yet the challenge we face as educators is to maximize the power we do have to influence the lives of children. Many children once labeled "at risk" who grow up to be successful often attribute their success to a caring teacher who took a special interest in them. There is much that competes for the hearts, minds, and souls of our students. When we fail to capture their interest, vulnerability to drugs, gangs, and other unsavory influences increases. Schools must find ways to successfully compete with gangs to meet the needs of children.

Discipline with Dignity offers an affirming approach to discipline that promotes respect for self and others. It emphasizes specific strategies and structures for educators to help all students, including the "throwaways," be successful.

To make the rewrite of this book as relevant and useful as we could, we thoroughly examined each chapter, paying careful attention to four factors:

• Given the changes in the world, society, school, and students themselves, what in the chapter is less relevant or perhaps not relevant at all?
• Given the same changes, what needs to be added to help with new problems and student behaviors?
• What should we keep that still has strong merit with updated, real-life examples?
• Could we continue to affirm all of the principles, beliefs, and values at the core of this approach? Did some need to be eliminated with new ones added or others changed to accommodate the realities of today?

At the beginning of each chapter, we have added a section called "What We Have Learned." In this section we review what has changed in schools and the ways students behave that address the concerns just listed. We then added to, subtracted from, or reinforced the previously written chapter to make its material relevant in today's classrooms. Much was significantly redesigned, some only slightly. What follows is a book true to our original vision and our beliefs that is, in our view, up-to-date and current, without losing what made Discipline with Dignity so special in earlier editions.

We enjoyed writing this edition and learned much from the process. More important, we believe that our efforts will help improve the lives of children. Nothing is better than that.