Better than Carrots or Sticks

Restorative Practices for Positive Classroom Management

By: Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey

Narrated by: Abby Craden

Classroom management is traditionally a matter of encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad by doling out rewards and punishments. But studies show that when educators empower students to address and correct misbehavior among themselves, positive results are longer lasting and wider reaching.

In Better Than Carrots or Sticks, longtime educators and best-selling authors Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey provide a practical blueprint for creating a cooperative and respectful classroom climate in which students and teachers work through behavioral issues together.

After a comprehensive overview of the roots of the restorative practices movement in schools, the authors explain how to:

• Establish procedures and expectations for student behavior that encourage the development of positive interpersonal skills
• Develop a nonconfrontational rapport with even the most challenging students
• Implement conflict resolution strategies that prioritize relationship-building and mutual understanding over finger-pointing and retribution

Rewards and punishments may help maintain order in the short term, but they're, at best, superficially effective and, at worst, counterproductive. This audiobook will prepare teachers at all levels to ensure that their classrooms are welcoming, enriching, and constructive environments built on collective respect and focused on student achievement.

This audiobook was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2015 ASCD (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Helpful

Our school is starting to use restorative practices so this was a really informative and helpful read.

Uncommon Name but Familiar Practices

If teachers weren’t fixed in their mindsets they would find a lot of restorative work they do naturally. The challenge though is it’s delivery to everyone not those selected targeted students. 🤷🏾

Good for new or alt. cert teachers

This book is a good refresher for any educator, but I think it would especially help new or alternatively certified teachers. There are lots of practical examples that came be implemented right away in your classroom.

Every School Needs Thid

Lots of basic practices that truly can change student relationships, growth, and school climate. It all starts with the staff and this book describes changes that need to occur to build a restorative environment.

Wow

As a teacher, you often get books that tell you what is wrong. Yes. We are aware. It is rare that the book gives you legitimate solutions. I will be buying this ad a paperback and listen to this often.

Disappointed in this much recommended book.

My first major criticism of the book were how many of the student testimonials read as straight fabrications and utterly unbelievable. It wasn't that they were better than one could hope for, but the way the book quoted children as speaking in ways that no student I've ever encountered speaks, as if they sound like a 90's kids show summing up the moral of the episode. I honestly felt that there was intentional exaggeration if not complete fabrications there. It made me have severe doubts about everything from that point forward.

After that, the book belabors the need to belittle the way that traditional disciplines are implemented. I get it, you're trying to sell the solution to the problem, but it oversells the need for a complete revolution in how we think. The narrator didn't help in that her reading came off as pretentious and condescending.

There are certainly tactics one can use from this. After reading it, though, I found that it made more sense to take those tactics and treat them as cards to add to my deck, rather than treating this new ideology the book sells as worthy of me throwing out the very well made deck I've built already.

Nothing new.

Just repurposed PBIS and life space interviews. No new research or studies. Waste of time.