In the past, our discipline module has been focused on reporting incidents to the state or federal government.  So it was mostly designed around handling negative behavior.

Many customers also want to document and manage positive behavior. Overall student discipline can often be improved by reinforcing positive behaviors, in addition to discouraging negative ones.  Our tool in its previous state didn’t handle positive incidents well, so in this release we improved it.

The first change is to expand the labels for students involved in a incident.  In addition to “Victim” and “Offender,” students can now be marked as “Bystander,” “Positive Contributor,” and “Other. “ This allows admins to create richer, positive incidents.

We updated the rules when creating an incident.  They can now be created without specifying an “Offender,” which used to be a requirement. Actions can be assigned to any type of student, not just “Offenders.”  This allows incidents to document moments of good citizenship, and give positive actions in response. Inside this structure, users will want to create a set of positive actions.

A discipline section was also added to the student/parent portal, making it easy to share positive incidents.  Incidents can be “published,” and become accessible by the appropriate parents/student only. The only free-text description published to the web-site is the “public notes” field.  Use this field to share complex thoughts, but please respect customary privacy restrictions. The other free-text fields are intended for internal use, are not exposed on the portal, and can safely hold sensitive information.

When published, links to the incidents appear in the student/parent newsfeeds.

We added a “Mass Publish” page for admins to easily publish positive incidents.  Filter by incident type, action type, and/or student designation to scope the incidents published.  Publishing can also be done when notifying individual incidents.

The student/parent portal publishing mechanism is controlled by an option.  So schools/districts can decide whether they’d like to publish incidents, or not.

-The Common Goal Team