Adam, I’ve been reading a lot of your behaviour stuff and have found it useful, but I’m really struggling with a particular student. He is deliberately rude and disruptive, and does anything to get a rise out of the others in the class. Do you have any advice?

I get this question a lot, and it’s really hard to answer. I’m no expert, and I struggle with students like this myself. There is lots of advice out there, some of it good and of course some of it not so good. Most of the good stuff focuses on things like clear warnings and boundaries, following up on minor infractions, maintaining a positive demeanour and not rewarding the student when they meet baseline compliance. All of that is really important, and I am not downplaying it in the slightest, but I think there is another interesting route that can be tried.

There’s a teacher I’ve been working with, and I recently observed the start of their lesson. It was extremely choppy, with students taking a long time to settle and get on with the work. He had to challenge a lot of students, and the lesson was fractious for quite a while following this point. It was like a tinder box, he would get them quiet and working, but then the slightest distraction – like a student walking in late, or dropping something off their desk or whatever – set everybody else off again.

The class also had one of Those Students mentioned in the question above, and he was revelling in the milieu: turning around, disturbing others, making jokes, calling out answers and loudly arguing back when challenged. That kind of stuff. Eventually he was removed from the lesson, the process of which also disturbed everybody else.

We discussed the lesson and looked at a number of strategies to calm things down for next time, things like making sure the work on the board is clean and clear as they come in, that the teacher should be in the doorway, that they should narrate compliance and use strategies like 3:30:30, Radar, Pastore’s Perch, Golden Silence, FLMOP and changing the seating plan (see more on that stuff here).

I come into the next lesson and he’s absolutely smashed it: he’s in the doorway, he’s keeping them calm as they come in. He’s implementing the strategies like we discussed. It goes significantly better, and all students are in and working within a few minutes. As time goes on, the level of calm is maintained, and even though he has to challenge students’ behaviour here or there it’s nothing major and it isn’t class-wide. Top stuff.

About ten minutes in, something amazing happened:

The teacher asked That Student a question. That Student then gave an extremely exaggerated and jokey answer. The answer was correct, but he basically paused, puffed up his chest and just yelled it out, and then immediately started looking around for laughs. But – and this is the amazing thing – no laughs were forthcoming. The others just sat and waited. The teacher calmly and quietly told the student to take a step outside and got on with the lesson.

I’d put a tenner on That Student’s behaviour improving after that point. He feeds off of the others in the room, revelling in their laughs and adulation. But in this case, he’s been starved of that input: the other students are quiet, calm and in “learning mode.” They aren’t as easily distracted by him and it leaves him with the knowledge that this kind of behaviour won’t do him any favours.

I’m reminded of a student I taught who showed similar behaviour: I kept having to move his seat: at first because he was disturbing those around him and later because those students who he was sat next to came to me and asked me to move him. Eventually, I took the student aside and just said “do you know why I keep moving you? It’s because your friends are coming to me and asking me to move you. They don’t want to sit next to you because of your behaviour. I can’t believe that’s the way you want them to think about you…is it?” I never had a peep from him after that.

There are some students who are really hard to get to do the right thing. The tricks mentioned above like FLMOP or 3:30:30 or Strong Threshold don’t always work with them. But they work with the others, and if you can sort the others first, then it might be that That Student gets onside. Of course, it might not, there is no silver bullet. But it’s probably worth trying.

If you enjoyed this blog I try to put on the occasional behaviour-based webinar when I can. You can see more information and be notified of updates here.