Disciplining our students

When our group lead the class discussion on classroom inclusion and community, I chose to focus on the articles in our "Rethinking Classrooms...." text about discipline.  As I am writing my final paper I am drawn once again to the ways in which we discipline our students. Discipline is one of many challenges we will face as teachers. How do we choose to discipline our students when they misbehave? We are responsible for creating a safe environment for all of our students, but what happens when a particular student or students refuse to follow our rules? I think that we would like to believe that all we have to do is say in our strictest voice that we will not tolerate such behavior and our students will fall in line, but what happens when they don't?

I read a different article on discipline by Linda Christensen who dealt with this type of situation one year. She says in it, "I've often said, "I just don't tolerate that kind of behavior". But this year, it was like saying, "I don't tolerate ants". I have ants in my kitchen. I can spray chemicals on them and saturate the air with poison and "not tolerate" them, or I can find another solution that doesn't harm my family or pets in the process."

So how are we going to discipline our students? Are we going to "spray" them and saturate our classroom with "poison" or can we think of better solutions? In this particular article Christensen learned that by helping her students achieve academic success, she could change their negative behaviors. Obvioulsy every student will be different though and different strategies will need to be used in different situations. If anybody has any comments or stories they would like to share on effective discipline, please share.