MANAGING THE ART CLASSROOM: USING WRITING AS A CONSEQUENCE; PERCEPTIONS

Below is a collection of informal data in the form of opinion surveys about using writing as a consequence for student misbehavior. The majority of teachers polled believe that this practice may be detrimental to students, especially for secondary students. This makes sense in light of research which shows extrinsic motivators lose their efficacy the older the student is.

However, I would love to know the specific reasons why the majority of teachers have this negative perception. My experience with writing assignments has been a positive one, even though I used to have the same negative bias. I experienced a paradigm shift when I first started teaching and saw firsthand the successful use of writing assignments used as a consequence.

More research is needed on this subject:

"Scant literature on assigning writing for punishment is available." Writing As Punishment, by Michael Phinney Hogan, The English Journal, Vol. 74, No. 5 (Sep., 1985), pp. 40-42

I believe the following resolution from 1984 has had a tremendously powerful impact on teachers' negative perceptions of using writing assignments for consequences:

Resolution On Condemning the Use of Writing as Punishment, NCTE Position Statement, 1984

"Using writing for punishment, NCTE members warned, distorts the principles and defeats the purposes of instruction in this important life skill and causes students to dislike an activity necessary to their intellectual development and career success. Be it therefore Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English condemn punitive writing assignments; that NCTE discourage teachers, administrators, and others from making a punishment of such writing as copywork, sentence repetition, original paragraphs and themes, and other assignments which inhibit desired attitudes and essential communication skills; and that NCTE disseminate this opinion to the appropriate audiences, including the general public."

However, this document is based on the opinions of Language Arts teachers, not on scientific data. I scoured their website in the hopes of finding empirical research that would back up their claim, but as of today I have not found any. All the research I have found is based on informal data collected from opinion surveys.

Here is another opinion about the drawbacks of using Think Sheets/Reflection Forms by a highly respected classroom management expert:

Why You Should Never Use Reflection Forms, by Michael Linsin, smartclassroommanagement.com

POLLS

Below is a screen shot of a poll I ran last year when this subject came up on the Art Teachers Facebook group. Of 145 art teachers who responded, slightly more than half felt that using writing as a consequence was detrimental to students and never used it in their classrooms. I created this survey again, but differentiated the teachers to see how this panned out for different grade levels. For the future, I would like to poll teachers more specifically about how/when/if they use the different types of discipline assignments. If you are swayed by "group wisdom" as I am, you might think twice about issuing writing assignments based on these responses.