The first article in The Messy Middle: Development-Informed Leadership Series challenges middle school leaders to rethink one of the most commonly reviewed end-of-year data points: discipline referrals.
Too often, discipline data is treated as a record of student behavior. But what if discipline patterns are also revealing something about adult systems?
In this article, I explore how referrals reflect adult interpretation, how adolescent development is often misread as defiance, and why leaders must look beyond incidents to examine the environments students experience every day.
You’ll explore:
Adult Systems as Data: Why discipline referrals reveal what adults notice, escalate, interpret, and protect—not just what students do.
Development vs. Defiance: How normal adolescent needs for autonomy, dignity, fairness, and belonging can become mislabeled as behavior problems.
Leadership Through a Different Lens: Why the most important leadership question may not be, “What’s wrong with these students?” but rather, “What are our adult systems creating?”
This article invites middle school leaders to examine discipline patterns as leadership data and to consider how systems either support or collide with adolescent development.
📖 Read the full article here 🔗: (3) The Adults Are the Data: What Middle School Discipline Patterns Reveal About Development, Power, and Adult Systems | LinkedIn
The Messy Middle is a development-informed leadership series exploring discipline, student agency, instructional power, and the systems that shape young adolescent experiences.