Ep #284: Defining Disrespect

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 284. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Hello my empowered leaders. Welcome to June. You have made it to the finish line, the promised land, you did it. I’m so proud of you. So happy for you. Hey, for those of you over in New York or other places where you go until the end of June, you’re almost there. I know in New York, they go late. 

But for lots of you, you ended either end of May or it’s early June. Perhaps in the next week or so you’re wrapping things up. We are celebrating you. We’re here for you at the Empowered Principal® program and cheering you all on. So happy for you guys. So welcome to June. Welcome to the podcast. So honored to be here with you today. 

We’re going to talk about a topic that one of my clients brought up, and it was such a great discussion. I had to share it with you. I think this is a topic that most of you deal with on a weekly basis, if not daily, and I wanted to bring the conversation to your attention because it was such a great discussion I had with my client. 

So we got on this topic of disrespect, and a conversation about teachers or even other staff members. Maybe it’s the lunch duty staff people or your office staff people. But there are certain adults on your campus who are very particular about their thoughts on disrespectful students. Children being disrespectful to adults. There is a thought out in the world that states that children should respect adults at all times. That you should respect your elders, and that the teachers and the adult staff members should be respected by the children, by the students. 

So think about what that means. We got into this discussion, and we’re like what? Let’s dive in because this is pretty juicy. It’s something you deal with. You have teachers who send students to the office or staff members who send students to your office saying I can’t deal with this. This child is being disrespectful to me. I was disrespected. Now it’s on your plate, and you’ve got to deal. 

So let’s talk about this and explore it from your angle, from your viewpoint. So that you can then explore a conversation, perhaps do this as an exercise with your staff, once you’ve kind of clarified what your thoughts are around disrespectful students, disrespectful behavior, what does it mean to disrespect somebody? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we know? What’s the metric we’re using? What is true or not true about disrespect? 

So one of the things that teachers will say is this child was being disrespectful in class. So the question I’d like to pose is, first of all, have you and your staff identified with clarity? Have you defined what is disrespect? What is considered disrespectful? My guess is that everybody has a different definition or viewpoint or measurement of what they define as disrespectful. 

I want to say something. I do think there is kind of a societal viewpoint that kids should respect adults and be respectful to adults, and that we’re taught from a young age that this is true and that it should be true. That we should show respect to adults. I’m not arguing that at all. 

I’m just observing that it is a value system, a belief system that we have in our culture, in our society, and different cultures around the world have a similar or same theory and the same belief system. We’re just acknowledging that it’s there. We’re getting curious about what are the thoughts behind the belief system? Right? 

So, my client and I were saying okay, what is disrespect, or what is respect? When somebody is showing us respect, what are they doing? How do we identify or label respect? So we made a list. It was things like listen to me, be polite to me, use a calm tone and an agreeable tone towards me when you’re speaking to me. Don’t make gestures to indicate your disagreement or your unhappiness with me. Do not disagree with me, obey me, and obey me immediately. Like there shouldn’t be a time lag. Or it’s disrespectful if you wait, as a student, and do what I say when I say it. 

When you think about this, we’re asking students to be respectful in the following ways. We want them to listen to us at all times, be polite to us, use a calm tone, an agreeable tone towards us. We want them to not show any signs of disagreement, discontentment, unhappiness. We want them to just go with the flow, be happy with it, and not disagree. We want them to obey our words, do what we say when we say it. 

So my question becomes if this is what we think that is the indicator of respect, why do we think this? Why do we believe that children should listen and be polite and use a calm tone and do exactly what we say and not make any gestures like rolling their eyes or crossing their arms or saying no to doing their homework or their classwork or disagreeing with us? Why do we think that that is necessary in order for kids to show respect or to be respectful? 

It’s interesting, right? Why do we think this is how children should behave? When we talked about it, the answer was well, for adults, it’s just so much easier when kids respect us, when they obey us, and do exactly what we want them to do. As adults, we don’t like it when someone doesn’t like our input, our feedback, or our request for them to do something. As adults, what we want is to control children’s behavior. We want to manage their behavior in a way that makes life feel good for us, feel better for us. 

Now, I’m not saying that children should go be wild and do all the things. What we’re noticing, though, is the belief system. We’re just examining the belief system about respect and what it means. So for adults, we’re thinking children should behave because it’s one, easier for us. Two, I can be in control, which keeps things safe, keeps things comfortable. I can control the environment around us. We don’t like to be rejected, quite honestly. When a student isn’t doing what we want them to do, it’s a type of rejection, right? It’s being rejected in some kind of a way. 

I was thinking about when students would be sent to me, and the comment was they were being disrespectful or defiant. That’s another word. This child was being defiant. Defiance would be like an opposition to, a refusal, right? Adults are seeing disrespect and defiance as a form of rejection of their wishes, desires, and requests. 

Because defiance is an action that children take when they disagree. You have to think about it. As a student, as a younger person, we do not have positional authority in the world to do what they want to do. They don’t get to have control over their little lives. I’m not saying they should, again, but we’re watching and observing and noticing how the adults came up with the rules and came up with the definition of respect. 

Children don’t have the physical authority, the positional authority, just the mental and emotional maturity to be able to make decisions in their best interests and in the best interest of others around them. So adults want to control that. But we have to understand and look at why would a child be acting in a way that we would label as disrespectful or defiant? When you think about that, that action is coming from a thought and a feeling in that child. 

You guys if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while you know about the STEAR cycle. You know that thoughts trigger emotions and that emotions impact our decisions and actions. That STEAR cycle, it’s happening in children too. They are young humans with human brains. The same process is happening for them as it is for us. So what we want to do is we want to look at their STEAR cycle and get curious about it. What might be happening for that child when they’re behaving in a way that we would label as defiant or disrespectful?

So I looked up respect in the dictionary because I wanted to see what Webster had to say about it. I found it so fascinating. It said the condition of being esteemed or honored. It also defined it as a deference to a right, a privilege, or position of authority that gives you certain rights and privileges and the proper courtesy. 

I thought to myself oh, respect is about being esteemed and honored. Adults want to be esteemed and honored. Respect is about a deference to being right, to having a right, to having a privilege, to being in a position of authority that gives you certain rights and privileges. It also grants us proper courtesy. 

Do you hear the words and language? I love reading things out of anybody’s dictionary because the dictionary was written by adults. The dictionary was written by probably mostly white people, let’s be honest. So the way in which we define words and define language is also coming from a human perspective. They’re trying to articulate the meaning of a word as neutrally as they can. 

Of course, I’m sure that they’re trained to do it that way, but you can hear how it does come across as how do you define respect? It’s an opinion. It’s whatever we think respect is. What some people deem as respect, others might think was disrespectful. What other people think isn’t essential to being respectful, other people think it’s an option. It’s flexible, right? 

Some people think you need to tip your hat if you’re a male when you’re greeting somebody. Other people think being respectful is opening the door for the person behind you. There are all kinds of little rules, cultural rules, societal rules that we have that we label as respectful or not respectful. 

Yelling at somebody. Somebody can yell at you. You can make it mean they’re disrespecting you. They are not holding you in the highest esteem or honor. They are not giving you the proper courtesy. You can believe that, or you can think wow, this person’s yelling. They have some pretty strong emotions right now. 

Or wow, they must have something really important that they want to say. They’re feeling frustrated. They need to get it across. I wonder what’s going on for them. Right? You can not make it mean that it’s being disrespectful, or you could make it mean that it’s being disrespectful. 

So I asked my client, “What’s your opinion? What do you think generates respect?” I love what she said. This is the one sentence why I created this podcast today. I asked my client what do you think about respect? Tell me your thoughts on respect. She said, “My belief, my personal value as a principal and the philosophy through which I lead my school, is that we always build connection before correction.”

She said, “Kids will respect adults who care about them and who spend time connecting with them. Kids will respond in the way that they are treated.” So connection before correction. Relationships are built through connecting. When kids know that they are valued, they will give you value back, which is so awesome for me as a coach because thoughts create results. Your thoughts, what you believe to be true, is always reflected back to you. 

So if teachers, I’m just thinking about the STEAR cycle here. If teachers are thinking that well, the students need to respect me and honor me and obey me and listen to me and be kind to me. If they don’t, that means they’re being disrespectful. Their brain is looking for evidence to define respectful students and disrespectful students. The brain is going to default to making an example of respectful and disrespectful students.

Now, what’s interesting, and you probably know this as a principal, but your staff members out there who tend to complain about being disrespected the most by students. If you were to interview the students and allow them to be honest, I think you’ll find that the most disrespected teachers, from their own opinion, are also the most disrespectful to students. 

You probably already have seen that correlation a connection. But it makes sense when you think about the STEAR cycle, right? Thoughts create results. If the result that a teacher is experiencing is I’m being disrespected by my students then it would be curious to know the thought driving that result. Why is she being disrespected? Why is he being disrespected? What does she think is happening? There’s going to be a laundry list of reasons why the teacher thinks these students are being disrespectful. 

Those thoughts are subconsciously generating an undesired result for that teacher. But if the teacher was like wow, this student is really having a hard day. This student is being defiant. I wonder why? Because defiance is an action, and even disrespect can be an action. 

If a student speaks back to a teacher or a student rolls their eyes at a teacher, or maybe a student is physically disrespectful. You definitely want to have boundaries in place and triage your behavior chart and manage your behaviors and have policies in place for overt misbehaviors. But there’s that gray area, right, where the kid isn’t really following direction, and they aren’t really doing what they’re being asked to do. But they’re not being harmful, necessarily, to others. That area where they’re just being disrespectful. 

You want to have a conversation. Why? What’s coming up for that kiddo? What are their thoughts and feelings? Why are they resisting? Why are they feeling defiant? Why are they expressing defiance? Why are they expressing behaviors that we would label as disrespectful?

It might be interesting to have this conversation with your staff. Not this year, but you can plan it for next year. Might be interesting, right, to explore a teacher’s thoughts on what respect means for adults, where they learned that. I promise you. If you were to ask your teachers what is respect? Should children respect adults at all times? Yes or no? Why or why not?

They’re going to have a story from their past, probably their childhood about a time that they acted out from their emotions that was deemed by the adults around them as disrespectful, and they were probably corrected for that or punished. So there are stories out there that tell us that we have to respect our elders, this is why. Then we bring that story into our adulthood, but we hold children accountable to it without really exploring what we’re making it mean about us, about them, about our relationship. 

Just perhaps if we were willing to go to the place where we explored what respect means and define it together as a school community, this is what respect looks like, this is how it feels. This is what it doesn’t look like. This is not the goal. Get very clear on what the goal is and what the goal isn’t. 

But also, how do we show respect for students? How do we create that connection before correction and establish an understanding that’s mutual so that respect can be earned. That respect is wanted to be given by the students because they know that there is a connection that they are also valued and that they are also cared about and respected back.

Interesting topic. Thought I should share it. It’s a topic that it hasn’t really come up in coaching lately, but I do remember as a principal, many, many, many times, children being sent to the office for being disrespectful. It might be worthy of a conversation and an exploration with your staff. 

If you’re in the summer between school years, it’s a great time to plan what that conversation might look like for your staff. Also think about what are the intended outcomes you’d like? What would you like to happen as a result of this conversation? Okay. Have a wonderful week. I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye. 

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