Helping Difficult Students

It’s not uncommon for teachers to encounter difficult or challenging students. If you are tired of dealing with negative student behaviors day in and day out, you are not alone—in fact, you are firmly in the center of the average teacher's experience. Still, managing difficult student behaviors eventually sucks the energy from most teachers, no matter how talented or experienced.

Sometimes you can get so frustrated and fed up with a difficult student that you want to hand down a severe consequence for even a minor offense. Remember to save the most stringent consequences for the most serious offenses. A lot of teachers give their most challenging students classroom jobs and other mild responsibilities. The reason is that this keeps them busy, feeling useful, and preoccupied with something other than misbehaving. There is nothing wrong with this strategy, and it can indeed calm a restless spirit in the moment. But the strategy doesn’t change behavior.

I learned that in order to change behavior there must be higher stakes involved. In other words, to make the strategy effective in helping to transform your most difficult students into contributing and well-behaved members of your classroom, failure must be a possibility. There must be a sense of, “I can’t believe my teacher is trusting me with this.” Because if there is no weightiness to the responsibility, then it won’t make an imprint. It won’t affect how they see themselves and what they’re capable of.

Building up self-esteem is often cited as a key to helping difficult students. But the idea as it’s commonly interpreted and used— mainly, in the form of false praise and external rewards—is a misnomer, because self-esteem isn’t something that can be handed out, granted, or created from the outside. It must come from within. It must be a naturally occurring result of true and honest accomplishment. Practically, your most difficult students will begin regarding themselves as capable—capable of learning, of being trusted, of overcoming difficulties, of caring for the welfare of others, and of being valued members of your classroom.

This produces a real and lasting form of selfworth, one undergirded with a deep root system that isn’t so easily discouraged, selfishly proud, or knocked askew by bumps in the road. The only way to convince these often over-praised but underappreciated students that they’re capable is to challenge them with responsibilities that matter and come with the very real possibility of failure. By Agnes L. Manzano