Handling Difficult Students in Class

                                    Handling Difficult Students in Class

    Almost every teacher has had a difficult student in one class or another,and some of us are lucky enough to have one in every class.
  Imagine this situation:You are trying to give a lesson on the past progressive tense.You stand up the white board talking about agreement between the subject and the helping verb and that this tense is used to describe a continuous action that was happening at a specific point in the past.While most students are listening and concentrating ,a child in the back taps his pencil,kicks his feet against the desk,leans back in his chair and then falls over onto the ground.With the clatter from the back,come the laughs from the front of the classroom,thus, a complete loss of concentration about any facet of English grammar.



      Keep your cool and take these tips for handling difficult students :

•   It's not about you:Though it may be a tough thing to hear,the first step is to remember it is not about you.As a teacher ,you are there to educate,guide and help your students.You are not there to captive audience hanging on your every word.We teachers sometimes have to shift our focus and remember why we started teaching in the first place.It is so easy to be caught up in our natural patterns as a teacher,especially when they have been effective up until this point.Having difficult students reminds us that we,too,need challenges and changes in our teaching style.If you can germinate the attitude in yourself that you can always improve,always learn,always find some way to be a better teacher,teaching a challenging student becomes an opportunity rather than a chore.Use the situation to your advantage to refine and deepen your craft as a teacher.All of our students,both current and future,will benefit from it.
• Take a closer look:Read your students.Pay special attention to facial expressions and body language as you teach.Challenge yourself to spend more time facing your students than you do to the white board.Look at them and notice the difficulty coming before it hits you and your classroom in full force.As you do this,pay special attention to why the misbehavior is beginning.
• Challenge your students:Sometimes students are not challenged.They may be  quick learners and find themselves bored before the lesson is over.There may be struggling students who have not understood previous lessons and are giving up on this one as well.There may be learning disability coming into play.If you suspect this,talk to an expert on the signs of and the solutions for different learning disabilities.Another reason they may be acting up because of a cultural issue of which you may be not aware.

  All of these situations and more can make class hard to handle for both of you and your students.

Now,what can you do to make things easier for both?
1-Group work can be the most effective way of engaging students under and over performing students.

2-Pair your most advanced students with those struggling.In this,your advanced students will become more of a teacher,challenging to explain the material better.Your struggling students get individual attention and perhaps a different explanation of the concept being taught.
3-Use the resources you have in other students to reach the ones you have difficulty reaching.
4- Change things up by breaking out of your curriculum when necessary to challenge students who are beyond what today's schedule says to teach.
5-Assign special projects to advanced students or let them work on their pace.If a student is not challenged in class,he might exhibit behavioral problems.A student who is challenged,on the other hand,will be more cooperative and tolerant when the class is studying something he understood long before that time.
6-Getting physical action is another great way to help students who have difficulty sitting and paying attention to a whole lesson.Engaging physical that ask students to move around help them become attentive and absorbent to what you are teaching.

As a teacher,you don't always have to do things by the book.You have to find the Undelying issue behind the disruptive behavior and you can tailor your lessons or assignments to meet you students' needs.
In fact,the best teachers are often the ones who do change.