See it, Own it, Solve it, Do it

Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman talk about See it, Own it, Solve it, and Do it in what they call the "Oz Principle."  When they discuss these items, they are referring to business and creating a culture of accountability.  We have taken that "culture of accountability" in our middle school.  Often times, when we talk about a culture of accountability in schools, we are simply talking about taking a test and holding the adults accountable for the result of these tests.  When we discuss accountability, we discuss true accountability for your own actions.  This accountability applies to all aspects of a students life.  Often times, when I talk to a student in the office about a student discipline issue, I use the see it, own it, solve it, and do it approach for students.

1. See It-Students are asked to see what the problem is.  Students are asked to list what areas they need to improve.
2. Own it-A key component of our lessons for our students is the 10/90 principle (Stephen Covey discusses the 90/10 principle-this is the same thing-at some point, we just turned it around and it stuck).  Ten percent of life is outside of your control.  Students are asked to identify that 10%.  As an example, a student might be in my office because he called another student a name.  The first thing that student is going to want to tell me is what the other student did first.  I will tell them that yes, that did happen and that is your 10 percent.  We usually beat them to the punch and ask them to identify the "10" before they have the opportunity to blame the other student for his/her own misbehavior. Then we move to what's the student's "90?" This is where we identify what the student did and what some better options might have been.  In some cases this is a short process and in other cases, the student may take some coaching to understand this concept.
3. Solve It-Now the student is asked to come up with a solution to the problem.  How is this going to be fixed or made better?
4.  Do It-After the solution has been put into place, we get back together (maybe a day later or maybe a week or even a month later) and discuss how the solution worked, what problems may have come up, and do we need to make changes to the original solution.  This really makes student discipline a process rather than simply a punishment that is seen as unrelated to the student behavior.

Of course consequences still exist.  Natural consequences are ideal and sometimes a logical consequence occurs when a good natural consequence can't be found.  Sometimes this See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It process is formal (written) and other times it is very informal (the words may not even be used but the idea is the same).