Transforming Student Discipline: A Teacher’s Reflective Essay on Moving From Punishment to Compassion in Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this reflective essay, I examine the impact of corporal punishment in Ghanaian schools by drawing on my experiences as both a victim and a former perpetrator of these practices. Through reflecting on the punitive discipline I endured and later enforced, I highlight the detrimental effects on students’ well-being, self-worth, and engagement in learning. Guided by Parker J. Palmer’s (1997, 2015) concept that “we teach who we are,” I point out the need for educators to embody compassion, empathy, and self-awareness. I also advocate for eliminating punitive discipline in favor of nurturing, supportive, and non-violent relationships that consider the broader socioeconomic and personal contexts influencing student behavior. By creating, sustaining, and promoting a caring, inclusive, and empowering school environment, I argue that teachers can address the cycle of fear and humiliation that stifles student engagement and instead create a space where students feel valued and motivated to develop their full potential.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".