Culturally Responsive School Discipline: Implementing Learning Lab at a High School for Systemic Transformation

Youth from racially minoritized communities disproportionately receive exclusionary school discipline more severely and frequently. The racialization of school discipline has been linked to long-term deleterious impacts on students' academic and life outcomes. In this article, we present a formative intervention, Learning Lab that addressed racial disparities in school discipline at a public high school. Learning Lab successfully united local stakeholders, specifically those who had been historically excluded from the school's decision-making activities. Learning Lab members engaged in historical and empirical root cause analyses, mapped out their existing discipline system, and designed a culturally responsive schoolwide behavioral support model in response to diverse experiences, resources, practices, needs, and goals of local stakeholders. Analysis drew on the theory of expansive learning to examine how the Learning Lab process worked through expansive learning actions. Implications for research and practice are discussed.