[Transcript of audio clip featuring Robert Marzano.]

Different teachers have different rules and procedures. However, every teacher should have rules and procedures no matter how good you are, no matter how easy your kids are. They say that to walk in the door and not have rules and procedures is a setup for disaster, because, at some point, people need structure—and at some point, that structure might break down. If you don’t have the rules and procedures in place, you are in trouble.

Let me jump to disciplinary intervention because that is a little more controversial. Some people hear discipline and they think punishment. And they think punishment is physical punishment.

First of all, nobody says physical punishment not only works nor is appropriate. However, there have been some interesting studies on disciplinary intervention. The one I like the best is the meta-analysis by Stage and Parole. They looked at over a hundred studies and they identified four categories of disciplinary intervention: punishment (a negative consequence if you break a rule), reinforcement (is not a negative consequence for breaking a rule but you reinforce positive behavior), the third is a combination of punishment plus reinforcement, and the fourth would be no immediate response—the teacher doesn’t necessarily attend to the disruption right there, but after-the-fact talks with the student and reasons through.

They rank-ordered those in terms of their impact on student behavior. Punishment plus reinforcement had the biggest impact followed by reinforcement, followed by punishment, followed by no immediate response. Actually “no immediate response” lagged fairly far behind.

The bottom line is that, in their [Stage and Parole] research and in the research of others, a reasonable system [that] employs both positive reinforcement for acceptable behavior and negative consequences for unacceptable behavior is the strongest approach.