How to Handle Disruptive Behavior

Instead of immediately reacting on the basis of the emotions you are feeling, give yourself (and your students) permission to stop for a moment.

Giving students a break can reduce the tension in the classroom and also gives you an opportunity to prepare a more productive approach to the situation.

Instead of asking Thomas to leave the classroom when he wouldn’t stop talking to his friends, Aaliyah could have said something like this: “I know we have already done a lot of work today, and I, for one, could use a little breather. Let’s take a 5-minute break to move around, and then I think we’ll be able to refocus our attention.”

It is especially easy for young or inexperienced instructors to take disruptive or inattentive students’ behaviors personally and begin to resent their students for what they see as a lack of respect.

However, when you take a step back and reflect, you can recognize that students are responding not only to you but also to a larger context. They might be feeling stressed or overwhelmed, or they may be struggling to keep up with what’s happening in class.

When you recognize that students’ behavior is a response to the classroom environment but isn’t about you as a person, you can more easily move beyond your own strong emotions. If Aaliyah had approached Thomas’s behavior in this way, she likely would have been able to avoid the kind of confrontation that occurred.

When you confront students in front of their peers, they may be embarrassed and feel the need to perform for their peers by escalating a confrontation. If you engage students in a more personal way, they are less likely to be defensive.

Instead of confronting Thomas in front of the entire class, Aaliyah could have talked to him one-on-one during a short break and said something like this: “Sometimes reviewing for exams provokes stress, but it’s really important for us to maintain focus so I can make sure everyone’s well-prepared. I’m concerned that you may be distracting others, so I would really appreciate it if you could not get involved in side talk. If you have any questions about the material, please ask because I’m glad to help. If we can all move forward with the review together, I think I can help everyone prepare well and succeed on the midterm.”

All the strategies above are productive initial responses to an instance of disruptive behavior, but sometimes teachers react too quickly, and they may find themselves in a situation where they feel like they can’t back down.

It is possible to change the course of the conversation without fearing that you’re condoning disruptive behavior.

After Thomas’s refusal to leave the class, Aaliyah could have taken a deep breath and redirected the conversation by saying something like this: “Wow. We are all so stressed at this point in the semester, including me! I’m glad you want to stay in class so that you can benefit from the review. I want to make sure that everyone gets what they need from this, so let’s see if we can work together to finish the review.”

You can also invite any students who were involved in disruptive behavior to stay after class for a moment so that you can make an appointment to talk with them later. This allows you to address the situation that occurred in class individually with those students when they aren’t in a position where they feel the need to save face in front of their peers.

A one-on-one conversation also provides another opportunity to remind the student that your goal is to support their learning by saying something like this: “I want us to talk again so I can make sure that you are on track. I know how stressful life can get, and I don’t want that to get in the way of your success.”

If you reconsider the case above, you can see that Aaliyah is spending most of the time in her discussion section reviewing information while students listen. While she thinks this is the best way to help her students, research suggests that when too much class time focuses on the instructor lecturing, explaining, or demonstrating, students often become passive (Knepp, 2012).

Students who don’t believe there is any work for them to do in the class or, worse, that it simply isn’t possible for them to keep up with what is happening, will find ways to distract themselves (and sometimes others). When you pause class regularly to have students engage in a learning activity, respond to a question, ask questions, review and recap their notes, or engage in a discussion, you can improve their perception of your willingness to help them learn.

One easy-to-implement strategy for engaging students is called think-pair-share: you pose a question and ask students to write down their answer, ask students to share their ideas in pairs, and then ask some of the pairs to share their thinking with the whole class.

Even simple learning activities like these can make a difference in the way students perceive their role in the class because they give students the opportunity to become more involved in their own learning. They also give you helpful feedback about what students do and don’t understand, allowing you to address misconceptions or make key clarifications.

Ultimately, when you take the time to engage students, find out what they are learning, and respond to gaps in their understanding, you demonstrate to students that you care about their learning.

Teachers often believe that certain behaviors (like attendance, participation, or submitting work on time) will lead to student success, and they will often seek to incentivize those behaviors and disincentivize behaviors they believe will inhibit student success.

While these are common approaches to trying to ensure appropriate classroom behavior, they can backfire for a number of reasons.

• First, they send very negative messages to students about their relationship with you. Focusing so much energy on policing behavior tells students that the teacher doesn’t trust them and is waiting for them to make a misstep so they can be punished. Students may come to distrust a teacher who seems to care more about having them follow the rules than about their learning.
   
• Second, a focus on extrinsic rewards and punishments can actually reduce students’ intrinsic motivation to learn.
   
• Finally, a system of rewards and punishments can put teachers in the position of grading student behavior rather than grading their learning; this means that the grades students earn may or may not have a strong correlation with the work they produce in a course.

Instead of relying on rewards and punishments to guide student learning, focus on creating frequent opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning so that you can respond to their learning rather than to their behavior.

For example, you might require students (for a completion grade) to submit a short writing at the end of each class in which they describe the three most important things they learned. Reading and responding to these short writings gives you an opportunity to assess students’ understanding and also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback on their learning.

This is very different from assigning an attendance or participation grade, which is really just about their compliance with a requirement you’ve set. When you keep grades focused on student work rather than on student behavior, you send a clear message that your job is to help them learn, not to control their behavior.

Research has shown that students become very frustrated with instructors who they find rude, arrogant, condescending, or dismissive of students, and students will often act out in response to teacher behaviors that they perceive as disrespectful (Boice, 1996). Basic demonstrations of respect toward students like consistently speaking in a polite tone, learning students’ names, and showing up for class on time go a long way toward showing that you respect students as people. 

However, it’s also important to show respect for students as learners. Using active learning strategies to engage students and assess their understanding (as described above) is a very important way to show students that you want to help them be successful.

Another strategy is to seek feedback from students about what is or isn’t helping them learn in your class. While there are formal measures for collecting extensive feedback from students (like CATLOE’s Early Semester Survey service), there are also some simpler, more informal strategies to facilitate communication with students.

For example, you might ask students to respond in writing to some basic questions like “What is one thing that is helping you learn in this class?” or “What is one thing that the instructor could do differently to help you learn in this class?”

Collecting this feedback just two or three times during the semester and responding to concerns can demonstrate that you respect students as learners and want to ensure their success. Students who feel respected are more likely to act in ways that demonstrate respect for their teachers and their peers.