William W. Purkey

William Watson Purkey, Ed.D. began his educational career as a public school teacher, rising to a fully tenured position at the University of Florida, and finally as Professor Emeritus of Counselor Education at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. His passion for teaching and leadership has earned him various awards of excellence in his field. He is also the co-founder of The International Alliance for Invitational Education. A noted writer, researcher, speaker, and leader, Purkey has authored nearly 100 articles and more than a dozen books.

Purkey writes, "At its heart, Invitational Education is an imaginative act of hope that explains how human potential can be realized. It identifies and changes the forces that defeat and destroy people. Invitational Education is designed to create and enhance human environments that cordially summon people to realize their potential in all areas of worthwhile human endeavor." [2] "Invitational Education asserts that organizations are never neutral. Everything and everybody either adds to or subtracts from an existing culture. Invitational Education offers concrete, practice, safe, successful and democratic solutions for problems that routinely harm organizations and the people within them."

“Human potential, though not always apparent, is there waiting to be discovered and invited forth.”

― William W. Purkey

Works

Classroom Behavior Management

In a short, 49 page collaborative book titled "Positive Discipline: A Pocketful of Ideas" (1986), William Purkey and David B. Strahan introduce the idea of high and low cards and orange and blue cards as a means of assisting teachers in utilizing positive classroom discipline techniques.

High and Low Cards

This idea of high/low cards as well as blue/orange cards acts as forms of classroom behavior management. High cards include more severe punishments such as sending students to the principal's office, detention, or calling home. On the contrary, low cards are a more mild form of classroom behavior management including raising eyebrows at the disruptive student, walking towards students while teaching, or sending students to 'time-out'.

Blue and Orange Cards

Blue and orange cards are the "messages that we receive" that "align with our self-concept". Purkey and Strahan visualize this self-concept as a "magnificent, but empty file box", a means of which we mentally collect interactions that form the view we have of ourselves as well as our self-worth. Each of these messages, whether encouraging and supportive or discouraging and demeaning, are filed into this imaginary file box. "Blue" cards fall under messages that are encouraging and supportive whilst "orange" cards are discouraging and demeaning. The amount of blue and orange cards as a result builds this individual self-concept, thus requiring students to need a plethora of blue cards to displace the negative effects wrought by even a single orange card.

References

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