15 How Do I Manage Student Behavior?

Darlene had one distinctly weak teaching skill, and it had to do with her inability to manage disruptive student behavior. Try as she might, Darlene simply could not quell the unruly students in her classes. If a grade cohort coming through the school had more than the usual share of clowns, rebels, and disruptors, then the behavioral issues would show up in Darlene’s classroom more than in any other teacher’s classroom. Darlene, the principal and other administrators, Darlene’s teaching colleagues, and the students all knew it. Darlene was the weak link in the chain of student behavior management. She tried every trick, strategy, and tactic her colleagues recommended, but nothing worked. Darlene’s psychologist even told her that she was projecting her insecurity over the class, drawing out its mischief to wreak havoc upon her teaching work.

Behavior

Student behavior is a big deal for teachers. If students don’t behave within reasonable rules, norms, and customs for academic environments and studies, teaching and learning quickly become difficult to impossible. Students don’t learn as effectively in unsafe, disordered, insecure, and chaotic schools. Students also don’t learn as effectively if they cheat their way through instructional programs, shortcutting the earnest striving that learning generally requires. Teachers are not solely responsible for maintaining orderly and honest student behavior. Administrators have significant responsibility to both back up teachers and follow through on discipline. But teachers are plainly at the forefront of managing student behavior and need sound methods for doing so. Make behavior management another one of your premier teaching skills. 

Codes

You should have significant aid in your management of student behavior from your school’s student code of conduct. State laws generally mandate student conduct codes, safety and security codes, zero-tolerance measures, and safe-school plans at the K-12 level. Those measures may address everything from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco use on school grounds to fighting, harassment, and intimidation. Especially significant to classroom order, school codes typically also prohibit insubordination, disruption, and disobedience. School norms and customs, and your own classroom rules spelled out in your syllabus, may define those broad terms. State laws may also mandate certain safety and security measures at the higher-education level, especially around violence and oppression involving hazing, bullying, weapons, and bomb or other terroristic threats. Federal laws add protections against sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, and date rape. You generally hold the legal authority to maintain order in your classroom. You also have the contractual and moral responsibility to do so. Step up to the challenge, with the help of your school’s administrators.

Academics

When dealing with student misbehavior, you should distinguish academic misconduct from behavioral misconduct. Academic misconduct involves some form of cheating or dishonesty affecting the integrity of the academic work itself. Schools generally maintain separate academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, or honor codes, apart from their student codes of conduct regulating non-academic misbehavior. Your school’s honor code may broadly condemn academic dishonesty, leaving its definition to you and your colleagues, and to academic norms and customs. Alternatively, your school’s honor code may define specific forms of academic misconduct such as unauthorized assistance, collaboration, devices, or materials on exams or assignments, plagiarism, dual submission or self-plagiarism, alteration of previously scored or graded work, unauthorized access to or distribution of confidential exam materials, and research fabrication or alteration. Know your school’s honor code, and monitor for cheating, including using whatever electronic tools and procedures your school offers or mandates for plagiarism and artificial-intelligence detection. 

Cheating

Address any academic cheating that you detect, according to your school’s honor code. If, for instance, the code assigns you the authority to investigate suspected cheating, determine violations, and impose a penalty short of suspension or expulsion, then do so diligently, following a process that gives the accused student notice of the allegations and an opportunity to respond. Impose a sanction that fits the seriousness of the wrong. The sanction may be anything from a warning and explanation if the student appears to misunderstand the wrong, to an oral or written reprimand, docked score or loss of credit for work, and repeating work or completing extra work. If you are unfamiliar with your school’s enforcement norms and practices, then get help from an administrator or colleague. If, instead, the honor code assigns investigation and discipline authority to an administrator, then report the matter promptly and support the process, but don’t interfere. Cheating isn’t a victimless wrong. It undermines instruction, grading, awards, and credentials, while stealing honor from honest students. Address cheating. Your school’s integrity depends on it.

Endangerment

Student cheating goes to the core of your teaching duties, affecting student instruction. Student endangerment implicates a different aspect of your duties as a teacher, not the instructional core but instead your supervisory duties. With younger students especially, a teacher stands in the role of a student’s protector, in loco parentis or as if in the role of a parent. You have the duty to ensure that no one harms students in your care, including preventing one student from harming another. Take immediate responsive action, both protecting students and notifying school officials, if you observe any weapon, ammunition, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, fireworks, other explosive device, pornography, fighting, threats of violence, bullying, hazing, harassment, arson, theft, extortion, interference with fire alarms or fire-suppression equipment, or other endangering activity. Let administrators follow the disciplinary procedures, while you support their investigation, procedures, and sanctions as they request. Do not ignore, minimize, or delay your response to any endangering condition. Student safety and welfare, and school order, reputation, and immunity from liability, may all depend on your swift and responsible action. 

Disruption

While cheating scandals and endangering behaviors can rock a school and need your swift and responsible action, your bigger day-to-day challenge may be managing mildly or moderately disruptive student behavior that doesn’t cross the line into rank endangerment. Students can act out in degrees. They can also know the lines not to cross, while pushing the envelope on how much they can disrupt your instruction. Some students will test their teachers, as far as they can push them before reaching the breaking point. If you teach in a program and at a level where students are still developing their capacity and willingness to maintain civil, respectful, non-disruptive behavior, then you know the problem. Student development stages and behavioral issues differ widely at different program levels. Young children may need nearly constant behavior management. College and graduate school students may need very little classroom behavior management. In between, in middle school and high school especially, students may need frequent, firm, subtle, and effective behavior management. Hone your behavioral skills. You may need them.

Performance

Your first and greatest tool in behavior management is your own performance as an effective instructor. Your organization, clarity, confidence, and constant engagement of students in meaningful instructional activities may minimize the number and frequency of student misbehaviors you face. If students are disrupting your classroom instruction, then examine your instructional presentation, persona, and pace. You may not be engaging students adequately in challenging and meaningful instructional activities. You may also not be projecting the confidence and command of a skilled instructor. You may alternatively not be respecting students or setting for them high expectations both for their academic engagement and their civil behavior. Up your game, and up their game. When you see disruptive behavior, promptly, firmly, and calmly call it out, not condemning the actor but instead articulating the inappropriate impact of the act. In a brief but firm and clear communication, use the student’s name, describe the specific misbehavior, and describe its negative impact. Then move promptly on as if the misbehavior will not repeat. Develop and deploy a sense of confidence and command, or a rebellious class may figuratively eat you alive. 

Relationship

A second tool that you have to manage student behavior, beyond your presence, persona, and command, is your relationship with the misbehaving student. Get to know the misbehaving student. Don’t immediately embarrass them in front of classmates, if you can avoid it. Instead, quietly arrange for them to stay after class, meet you in your office, or come early to the next class. Show interest in their academic growth, interests, and development. Ask them how you can help them with their studies. Some students misbehave because they do not comprehend their studies. If the misbehaving student has a related disability, get your school’s accommodations officer’s help in evaluating and supporting the student relative to the misbehavior. Offer the student your support, and then ask them to support you with their civil, non-disruptive behavior. Then, back in class, show them greater respect. Involve them in leadership or service activities in class. Appoint them as a group leader. Call on them for answers and opinions, assign them to recite, and ask them to help distribute class materials. Give them greater responsibility, not less. Set higher expectations, not lower. And do these things before they repeat any misbehavior. Arrange in advance of class to positively engage the miscreants, alongside other students, from the first moment of class. Once you develop a positive relationship with a misbehaving student, all they may need for a correction may be a glance from you or you stepping nearer their seat to silently communicate your concern.

Strategies

Whether consciously or unconsciously, teachers develop and deploy various strategies, like those named above, to discourage and control student disruption of class. In addition to the things just mentioned above, you might assign students to specific seats, separating disruptive students and putting especially challenging students in front seats nearest you or side seats outside of the direct view of the class. If the classroom furnishings permit it, you might rearrange seating into rows, a circle, groups, or another configuration that reduces opportunities for disruption. You might also reduce the length of your presentations, when students must sit quietly and concentrate, and increase classroom engagement around individual work, paired work, and group work. You might assign the miscreants to separate groups or pair them with especially well-disciplined students with persuasive personalities. You might also redirect the misbehaving student’s energy, such as to assign them the role of recording on a whiteboard points that other students raise or to briefly undertake some related online research to report the answer to the class. Develop and deploy your behavioral management toolbox. 

Support

You may reach the point, sooner or later, of needing support for your management of student classroom behaviors. If you teach at the K-12 level, you may, for instance, find it appropriate or necessary to involve the student’s parents. Some parents can be extremely effective partners in holding their children accountable for civil classroom behavior, although other parents may not be effective or helpful. Give it a try. You may alternatively have a classroom aide or assistant whom you can recruit into the class, to sit alongside or near misbehaving students for prompt correction or other support. You may have students in the class willing to act as mentors or coaches, although don’t unduly burden students with management of classmates. That’s your job, not their job. You may alternatively wish to have a disability accommodations officer observe your class to determine whether its misbehaving members may be exhibiting emotional disabilities to investigate, diagnose, and accommodate appropriately. You may alternatively wish to make arrangements before class with a disciplinarian to whom you can send misbehaving students or whom you can call to the class to intervene, either to observe, admonish, or remove miscreants. Simply having a principal, assistant principal, dean, or director sit in the back of class to observe may communicate to misbehaving students that the time has come to shape up or else. 

Accountability

Ultimately, you must hold students accountable to the school’s behavioral standards in your classroom teaching. If the above methods fail to do so, then you may need to invoke the school’s student code of conduct and its disciplinary procedures, to hold students accountable for their insubordinate, disobedient, or disruptive conduct. Consult with your school’s disciplinary officials. Document in a confidential writing the misbehaviors as they occur or immediately afterward, so that you can show to those disciplinary officials the number, frequency, and types of misbehaviors and their impact on your class. And then support disciplinary officials in their investigation, hearing procedures, and sanctions. School officials may have a significantly broader range of sanctions and positive remedial measures that they can employ to bring misbehaving students into line. Don’t take everything on yourself. Let school administrators do their jobs. And hold them accountable, too, to back you up. 

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how strong are your skills at managing student behavior? How frequent or infrequent are the instances when you must pause class to address student misbehavior? Do you know your school’s student code of conduct? How often have you had to invoke it, reporting a student for endangering or disruptive behavior? Do you know your school’s academic honesty policy or honor code? How often have you had to invoke that policy or code to address instances of cheating? What are the common forms of cheating that you see or suspect? How do you monitor for those common forms? Do you or does your school use plagiarism detection or artificial-intelligence detection software to review student academic work? Does your school use video surveillance, computer keystroke monitoring, gaze-tracking software, or other surveillance equipment to detect suspected cheating or other student misbehavior? If so, how effective are those systems in supporting your duties as a teacher to monitor student behavior? What are your best strategies for dealing with disruptive students in class? Do you have a colleague more skilled than you at managing disruptive students, on whom you could call for advice? Do your school’s administrators adequately support you in your management of disruptive students? If not, what further support would help, and how can you go about requesting and arranging it?

Key Points

• Teachers are responsible for student classroom behavior and order.

• Schools maintain student codes of conduct closely regulating behavior.

• Schools also maintain academic honor codes regulating academics.

• Monitoring and disciplining or reporting cheating is a teacher’s role.

• Teachers are also responsible for student safety and security in class.

• Teachers must address student behaviors that disrupt the classroom.

• Your instructional persona and performance can diminish disruption.

• Your positive relationship with students can reduce misbehaviors.

• Develop and deploy multiple strategies for controlling behaviors.

• Get administrator support for managing incorrigible students.

• Invoke school disciplinary procedures to hold students accountable.

Read Chapter 16.