EMBRACE POSITIVE DISCIPLINE

VIERNA T. PANGAN

Why do we need to embrace positive discipline? When we care about what will be the effect of our actions to our students, when we tell words that will uplift their morale, when we don’t want to see them as future problems of the family, when we want them to be a good member of the community, when we want them to be “Mabuting Tao”, we are embracing positive discipline.

When you really work hard, burn the nights preparing your lessons and always looking and adapting new trends in teaching, you care about the positive result to students. When you don’t want them to be left behind, still teaching despite some frustrations, a little anger, and still manage to work in a more controlled way, then that is discipline. Students work on a more controlled way, even in our lessons. They need to be guided. If situations do not go according to plans, we just go back to the details and analyze again the situation. Probably, we can lay our guidelines to ensure that they fully understand what we expect from them.

Let us not stop from giving positive reinforcements that will inspire and motivate our students to work harder. Let us not stop from setting goals to foster appropriate behavior to maintain a “happy school workplace”. Let us not stop from giving strong support and reminding them always to strictly follow the rules and regulations of the school.

Students should achieve a very satisfactory attitude and behave well. They should practice and integrate values in their everyday activity in the school. Their freedom lies in their hands and they should act and behave what is expected of them: they are doing the right thing even when no one is looking.

Positive discipline will be our partner in molding these students. We don’t need students who obey every command, rather the one who strives to be better, understand every situation and a mature contributor of our society.

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The author is Teacher III at Nicanor David Vergara High School, Mexico, Pampanga