25 Sure-Fire Strategies for Handling Difficult Students | Scholastic.com

A teacher's ultimate goal is to teach students be better people. But a teacher has to connect to her/his students first before s/he can achieve this goal. Therefore if there are difficult students in a class (which happens often), this will be more challenging for both the teacher and the whole class. There are several articles that deal with this subject. Take a look at the following article from scholastic.com.

This article was excerpted from Learning to Teach...Not Just for Beginners: The Essential Guide for All Teachers by Linda Shalaway.

Effective teachers discipline with encouragement and kind words much more often than rebukes or reprimands. The goal is to help students feel good about themselves and their behavior in the classroom.

Inevitably, though, misbehavior happens. When it does, keep the collected wisdom of experienced teachers in mind:

• Take a deep breath and try to remain calm. It's natural to be overcome with frustration, resentment, and anger. But when you are, you become less rational, and your agitation becomes contagious.
   
• Try to set a positive tone and model an appropriate response, even if it means you must take a few moments to compose yourself.Acknowledge that you need time to think, time to respond. "This is upsetting me, too, but I need a few minutes to think before we talk about it."
   
• Make sure students understand that it's their misbehavior you dislike, not them. "I like you, Jason. Right now, your behavior is unacceptable."
   
• Give the misbehaving student a chance to respond positively by explaining not only what he or she is doing wrong, but also what he or she can do to correct it.
   
• Never resort to blame or ridicule.
   
• Avoid win-lose conflicts. Emphasize problem-solving instead of punishment.
   
• Insist that students accept responsibility for their behavior.
   
• Try to remain courteous in the face of hostility or anger. Showing students that you care about them and their problems will help you earn their respect and establish rapport.
   
• Treat all students respectfully and politely. Be consistent in what you let them say and do. Be careful not to favor certain students.
   
• Be an attentive listener. Encourage students to talk out feelings and concerns and help them clarify their comments by restating them.
   
• Model the behavior you expect from your students. Are you as considerate of your students' feelings as you want them to be of others? Are you as organized and on-task as you tell them to be? Are yourclassroom rules clear and easy for students to follow?
   
• Specifically describe misbehavior and help students understand the consequences of misbehavior.Very young children may even need your explanations modeled or acted out.
   
• Be aware of cultural differences. For example, a student who stares at the floor while you speak to him or her would be viewed as defiant in some cultures and respectful in others.
   
• Discourage cliques and other antisocial behavior. Offer cooperative activities to encourage group identity.
   
• Teach students personal and social skills — communicating, listening, helping, and sharing, for example.
   
• Teach students academic survival skills, such as paying attention, following directions, asking for help when they really need it, and volunteering to answer.
   
• Avoid labeling students as "good" or "bad." Instead describe their behavior as "positive," "acceptable," "disruptive," or "unacceptable."
   
• Focus on recognizing and rewarding acceptable behavior more than punishing misbehavior.
   
• Ignore or minimize minor problems instead of disrupting the class. A glance, a directed question, or your proximity may be enough to stop misbehavior.
   
• Where reprimands are necessary, state them quickly and without disrupting the class.
   
• When it's necessary to speak to a student about his or her behavior, try to speak in private; this is especially true of adolescents who must "perform" for their peers. Public reprimands or lectures often trigger exaggerated, face-saving performances.

 

When Personalities Clash . . .

Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we find ourselves actively disliking one of the students in our charge. The student may be rude, disrespectful, disruptive, obnoxious, or otherwise annoying. It's just human nature; some personalities clash. But instead of feeling guilty about our feelings, we can take positive steps to improve them, says school psychologist and teacher Shelley Krapes. Here are some of her suggestions:

• Try to understand where the behavior is coming from. Is the student distressed by a death, divorce, new baby, learning disability, or some other overwhelming experience? Speaking to the student's parents or guardian may shed light on underlying causes and help you develop sympathy through understanding.
   
• Help yourself manage negative feelings by reflecting on a past situation in your life where a similar conflict occurred. Discuss the situation with a friend or by writing your thoughts in a journal. Making and understanding these connections can help you let go of some of your current hostility or resentment.
   
• Use positive strategies when dealing with the child. One such strategy is addressing specific behaviors with precise language that describes what needs to be done. In addition, try to seat the student near to you or a helpful student, praise the student liberally but sincerely, give the student choices to promote self-worth and feelings of control, be firm and consistent about your rules, and express displeasure with the student's behavior without criticizing the student.
   
• Set a goal. If the situation between you and the child has not improved after two or three months of your best effort, it may be time to recommend professional/psychological/educational testing. Some problems are very complex and beyond your control.

25 Sure-Fire Strategies for Handling Difficult Students | Scholastic.com

A Teacher's Life

"You can not give what you don't have."
This is probably the most valuable lesson I learned in college.
A teacher has to master his/her subject matter, because, after all, how can he/she impart knowledge s/he doesn't have?
When I myself went teaching, I realized that this adage applied not only to teaching students, but to life, in general. It is true, "You can't give what you don't have." You can't give a child a mango, for example, if you don't have one.
Teaching in a private high school, with students who had more technological gadgets than I had shoes in my closet. My mastery of my subject definitely was useful, but other than that, there were other things I found out that I needed to equip myself with. Material things, apparently these children did not lack. I found they yearn for something else, aside from the education they obviously went to school for. Many times, I found myself faced with a boy who had crush, but was confused what to do with his feelings. Or the girl who seemed to be ignored by her parents, apart from giving her all the things money could buy. Or the boy that rarely stayed still, and seemed to be living his life annoying others.Then there was a boy who was at odds with the world. And more. Clearly, all these situations needed something else beyond the academic knowledge a teacher had studied and trained for in college. It's not that the college did not warn us about these non-academic situations at work. It's more of  deciding on the actual situation and not knowing the outcome.
When I transferred to a public school, it was a different game. And I needed another game plan. Here, the students have other challenges. Some of them, academically inclined, but were hindered by material lack. Like some of them would go to school with empty stomach and could not concentrate on the lesson, much less anything else. Or others would be absent not because of laziness but because of industriousness--they needed to help their parents at the farm or something. Still others just because they did not have anything to wear--and I am not talking about lack of clothes in trendy fashion. I am talking about practically not having clothes for school at all. One time, we had one student who passed out while doing a class activity. I found out later, he didn't have breakfast; he walked three kilometers to school that morning; and he had had no snacks nor lunch. It was a wonder how he was able to participate in his other class activities. Our school's dilemma was the academic and social growth of our students. They would, for instance, win in inter-school activities, but it was hard to send them forward to the next level for lack of budget. Sometimes, if teachers could not get the amount, these children, deserving as they were, could not proceed to the next stage of the competition.

The teacher's life does not revolve just around the school. Outside, they have family and friends who also need their attention.At home, they had to take care of their children and their spouse. They need to put food on the table, clothes on their family, roof on top of their heads. And much more. But even the single teachers also face their own challenges. Often, taking for granted their availability, people seem to think that single teachers do not have any familial responsibility and therefore demand more of them.

Their community would also ask for their time. The town fiesta would need organizers; the purok would need hands in cleaning the posts; the women's organization would have an outreach; the church would need a lector and a catechist; a friend needed someone to watch over her children while he/she ran errands; a relative needed money for her daughter's tuition or for his boy's medicine.
Such an overwhelming picture.

"You cannot give what you do not have." With this in mind, does this mean that a teacher has to have everything and be everything to do his/her duties properly?
To balance all the roles a teacher needs to perform, and at the same time be centered as a person, a teacher needs to be equipped with everything necessary to keep from being overwhelmed.
Short of being a superhuman, how does a teacher deal with all this? An interesting question. The answer is still, and always, an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery.

 The good news is that a teacher is not alone in this. In the Philippines, there are thousands of teachers, who might have similar experiences and problems, and therefore, might also have answers that might be helpful. Aside from that, there are other people from different fields who have a lot of things to share willingly and voluntarily, to make life easier for an educator.

All we need to do is open our hearts and minds to such experiences and try something that would make our lives better. And then, do our part in also sharing what we know to those who might be able to learn from them.

Together, we can continually enrich ourselves for a better life.