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Elementary principal Joanne Rooney remembers the days when she and her faculty invested a lot of time and energy in enforcing long-standing rules like "no gum chewing," maintaining careful records of chewers and spelling out the evils of gum. "But our efforts were of no avail. Defeated, we regrouped to analyze the point of it all." Ultimately, the faculty settled on five rules of behavior "in harmony with our work as educators, not prison guards." Something significant happened, Rooney says, "as teachers spent less time deciding on rules and complex consequences: The more seriously we attended to the matter of successful student engagement in learning, the less we needed to address rule-breaking and consequences. When students' daily experiences in the classroom were positive and successful, misbehavior became less of an issue."

Rooney, J. (2006). The principal connection: Picking our battles. Educational Leadership (April 2006, Vol. 63 No. 7). Retrieved from ASCD 13 May 2008. http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/template.MAXIMIZE/menuitem.459dee00...

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