Positive Discipline in the Classroom
Positive Discipline in the Classroom (developed by Jane Nelsen and Lynn Lott) is a research-based classroom management program that empowers teachers with skills to build their students’ sense of community, prepare them for successful living, and increase academic achievement. Experiential learning methods give you skills to help students practice better cooperation, social skills, self-direction, responsibility, and mutual respect in the classroom.

Positive Time Out, Positive Discipline

Some Brain Science
Positive Discipline uses brain science to understand how our brain works and the need to calm down before solving problems. In our school community we use the Brain in the palm of your hand model from Dr. Daniel Siegel, (Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center).

With this model, we learned that when our brain is calm, the prefrontal cortex of our brain allows us to be empathetic, think and solve problems. When we are mad, sad or scared, our prefrontal cortex, shuts down and stops working. Our brain “flips the lid”, which means our limbic system takes over and emotions leave us only with fight, flight, freeze options. When our brain flips the lid and our emotions take control, we cannot solve problems effectively, so first we need to calm down.

In classrooms, students brainstorm different ways we all could use to help our brain calm down when we flip our lid. These ideas are displayed in our calm down area.