Effective Classroom Discipline Strategies for Maintaining School Discipline in Limpopo Province, South Africa: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Disruptive behaviour at schools has become a huge challenge whereby teachers are faced with learners who are unruly and lack respect. As the government has banished punitive measures such as flogging, effective discipline strategies such as positive reinforcement needs to be implemented so that discipline is restored and strong teacher -student relationships are restored so that the classroom and the school environment is conducive. Mixed method research was used, and the selected research design was the convergent parallel design which allowed the researcher to collect both qualitative and quantitative data as the same time. For data collection, the researcher conducted surveys and interviews of both teachers and learners and also visited previous literature on effective discipline strategies. The study intended to understand the nature, historical overview and the impacts of reactive and proactive discipline strategies together with the challenges encountered when implementing effective discipline strategies without the use of punitive measures. This study unravelled that there are other discipline measures that yield positive results, yet they require time, dedication, support and ongoing training to be fully implemented and used in different school settings with students from different cultural background.