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Your Career• 3 Min read

6th September 2020

Dealing With Difficult Students – 5 Tips For Managing Tough Situations

Dealing with difficult behaviour is a part of every teacher’s job, at every stage of education. Children are naturally energetic and curious, prone to questioning even the most basic instruction! We’ve put together 5 of our best tips for managing tough situations but we’d love to hear your ideas and experiences too, come over to twitter and tell us how you manage negative behaviour in your classroom.

 
BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

Teachers are the ultimate relationship builders. As well as colleagues and mentors, they have 30 small, unformed personalities to build relationships with, all with different emotional needs, not to mention their parents! Start building relationships both in and outside the classroom with your pupils and their guardians – providing structure and routine, smiling, showing enthusiasm for the topics you are teaching and sharing an appropriate amount of your own life and personality are all great ways to build positive classroom relationships. There are some more in-depth ideas for teachers looking to develop their relationship-building skills especially with younger pupils here!

Establish Code Of Conduct

Ensuring that your pupils know the rules and why they are in place could be enough to stem most casual behaviour issues. If students are aware of the consequences of their actions they are less likely to misbehave in the first place, and respect can be gained from sticking to your guns when it comes to punishments.  Involving students in the creation of rules or code of conduct for classroom, such as by designing a poster or reward system for a display is a way to build your expectations into the class culture. Explaining why rules are in place clearly and concisely will save you a lot of repetition in the future!  Here’s some of our favourite Conduct and Behaviour displays from Pinterest:

STAY CALM & KEEP TEACHING

When an incident of bad behaviour occurs, a teachers reaction is everything. Pupils will take cues from the pupil in question or the teacher – being seen to ‘blow up’ or lose your temper will make it harder to regain the respect of the class. Stay calm, take a few deep breaths and follow through with the expected punishment for bad behaviour. Dealing with incidents quickly reduces the amount of class time spent on dealing with bad behaviour and it shows other pupils with the inclination to misbehave that they will receive a swift response!

Avoid Labels

Remember that pupils aren’t all good or all bad, every individual in your class has a multi-faceted personality! Approaching each day with a clean slate can have great benefits when it comes to building positive relationships with pupils and reinforces dealing with bad behaviour in a positive way – children can be very aware if their teacher seems to have a grudge against them and this can cause further behaviour issues. 

Establish The Root Cause

The vast majority of bad behaviour stems from pupils either struggling with work they find too hard or becoming bored with activities that they deem to easy or to be reinforcing knowledge they already know. It can be difficult to balance activities especially if you have a broad spectrum of abilities in the class. Try providing additional tasks after work has been completed that have an element of fun and expand on the knowledge being taught. Building this into your lesson plan can allow brighter pupils to learn at their own pace and provide them additional stimulus to prevent boredom. There are so many great ideas for early-finishers here! 

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