If a situation involves harassment, hostility, or intimidation toward a particular community member, our first step should be to make the person feel safe. Here are some tools you can use to help you:
The goal of disciplinary counseling is to gather information on what happened, get students to understand why it was inappropriate, and help them correct their behavior and become more mature.
This does not replace sanctions, like being removed from an event, which are needed for the direct safety of our community and deter future bad behavior. (In addition to disciplinary counseling, most situations should also be escalated to our conduct team.) However, discipline can be approached as a way to help students improve.
Students often feel the need to challenge rules and infringe on the rights of others. When we counsel students who have violated our conduct standards, our goals are to:
When we approach students who’ve violated our standards, it’s important to start with an expectation that the student is reasonable (thus the term “Approach” rather than “Confront”). This is often more true than we’d like to believe in the heat-of-the-moment, and we are regularly able to change the behavior of previous violators.
It can help to de-escalate further to remember that Code Evangelists are just arbitrators between the official policy and the student. While we must understand and convey the reasons for the policy, students should understand that the discussion is not “you vs. them,” it’s “the conduct standards vs. them.”
Students don’t want to hear a lecture, and it serves little purpose anyway. It’s important for us to guide the conversation, but our ultimate goals are, as above, to understand their motivations, and help them improve in the future.