The effective management of student discipline is critical to the success of any school.
Educators are confronted with the challenge of maintaining school safety while minimizing the number of long-term suspensions. Student and teacher safety are extremely important, but in order for students, who compromise the safety and conduciveness of the learning environment, to be successful, they need to be in class.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a program that could provide school administrators with a restorative practice to help minimize the number of out-of-school suspensions, supply teachers, counselors, and behavior interventionists with an evidence-supported intervention that teaches students individualized self-regulation skills, enabling them to be successful in the classroom and beyond school? Moral Reasoning Training, MRT, is a program that can address all of these needs.
MRT is an evidence-supported intervention that provides a sequence of twelve detailed lessons to help students improve their skills for self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, building positive relationships, responsible decision-making, creating goals, and developing action steps to achieve them. The interactive lessons that are found in the MRT workbook incorporate components from art therapy, oral and written expression, and self-reflection, all of which help students identify and acknowledge the behavior(s) that prevent them from being successful, their triggers, and positive behaviors they can develop to replace the negative. My presentation will explain how this intervention helped decrease discipline referrals by approximately 80 percent while increasing attendance and graduation rates.
