How to you control a disruptive class?
by mohicansgonnagetya
How do you deal with noisy/disruptive students?
How to you control a disruptive class?
by mohicansgonnagetya
How to you control a disruptive class?
by mohicansgonnagetya
23 comments
Set goals for the class to get a small reward at the end of each day.
I’m assuming you’re taller than most of them
If that’s the case, or you’re fairly athletic
I like to practice a philosophy known as the foot/face way
I say, “listen, please” and gesture to my ears. I never raise my voice in class. If they keep talking then IDGAF. It’s not our responsibility to discipline them and it’s their own time they’re wasting. It means nothing to me. The class will correct itself through HRT or classmates.
As ineffective as it might seem, a deep, loud “Shhhh!” followed with a stern look works wonders.
I was talking with some teachers about that a few months ago. I was asking if it was ok to scold the class (it was) and if it would be better to yell at them in Japanese or English (went with Japanese).
Another teacher suggested the “Shhhhh!”
I tried that out first and to my surprise it worked really well.
Mind control.
If I go from shouting ‘listen please’ to ‘聞いてください’, the momentary stunned silence that the funny English man speaks a little Japanese is enough to reset the noise level.
For older students, I simply stop talking and put my finger on my lips. I’ll look directly at the students talking while I do.
Usually classmates will jump in to tell them to be quiet so class can continue.
If they just seem to be excited, I try to roll with it and give them a more active/loud activity to do.
I keep an engraved bat behind my desk with the words “Classroom Management” written ominously on it. It’s bolted to the board so it actually can’t be removed. But the students always whisper about it in hushed tones….
Sometimes I just stop talking for as long as it takes until they shut up. And if they don’t then awhhh well 🫠. Only one of us is getting paid at the end of the day.
Other times I just keep up the pace and the rhythm of the lesson so they don’t have time to talk. Any disruptive student that clearly doesn’t give a sh*t after multiple corrections gets booted outside until they decide that they want to be here. Any violent student gets banished from the school along with their neglectful parents.
If it’s particular students being noisy, call them out by name and just ask them if they are okay. It’s an easy way to tell them to pay attention without anybody losing face and nobody getting angry.
Generally I just pause, look straight at the offender and say either “can I help you?” or “hello?”.
It doesn’t matter if they are looking back at me or not because I have a good enough rapport with the class that the rest of them deal with it for me.
These are JHS students though, no idea how this would go down with younger kids.
The other thing that really helps is engaging with those students outside of class so that they are just that little more interested when you are teaching. It doesn’t work for everyone, but for certain kids the change can be quite dramatic.
Sometimes they even go from being the worst pain in the ass into kids that are actually fun to teach because that talking in class becomes engagement and you can use that willingness to talk to your advantage.
All that said you will very occasionally get a kid that simply doesn’t want to be at school in any class full stop! If there are two of you, just get one of you to keep that kid in line and let the other teacher teach the rest.
It really depends on the setting. A school setting (ES/JHS/SHS/Univ) is always more ideal than a language school (eikaiwa/cram school/after school program) setting.
In the former, calling on the offender usually helps. You don’t necessarily need to scold the offender – asking “what were you doing”/“what were you talking about” should suffice.
If you’re dealing with a large class and everyone tends to talk, prepare a lot of tasks so that they don’t have time to chitchat. Make sure the tasks are printed and require some writing/looking up the dictionary so their focus is on the print material first.
If you’re experiencing this in an eikaiwa setting, there’s nothing you can do other than scolding/booting out the offender. But I’d be cautious about wasting time on the talkers since sometimes there are other students who actually want to learn.
Lots of ways.
1) I’ll sit down and be quiet until they realize something is going on. I’ll ask the last noisy kid if I can continue or do they want to keep wasting my time.
2) doesn’t work? Time to bust out the teaching voice shout.
3) doesn’t work? They are out of my classroom and get to sit with the student disciplinary head or their homeroom teacher.
4) phone calls home, formal records of admonishment, and the student stays after school to write a self reflection statement of regret.
During final exams, I just cut the bullshit and say any disruptive behavior is an automatic 0 for all tests of the day and I do not allow exceptions.
I also don’t expect them to be quiet all the time. My classes are designed for a lot of group work and seem loud and chaotic when compared with a normal national curriculum class.
Also it really depends what age group you are with and how good your school administration is at disciplining students.
Refer to your school’s student handbook to see if the disruptive behavior is listed and what punishments are expected.
I quietly get their attention with eye contact and make a shush gesture. Or if they’re fooling around during an activity, quietly get their attention, and tell them to focus.
The occasional loud whistle.
At my eikaiwa school, I have a small class of two 4th-graders and three 3rd-graders. They’re all great kids, I’ve loved having them all year, but lately the two 4th-graders have been getting chatty with each other while the 3rd-graders are giving their end-of-the-lesson presentations.
Last week before the class started, I pulled the two 4th-graders into a separate room and leveled with them about how I need them to be setting a better example and showing respect to their classmates. They got it and we had zero issues in that lesson.
Sometimes just be real with the kids and explain how their actions may be seen by other people.
Duct Tape
Depends on where you are located and what your duties are?
What kind of school do you have? Academic, Mediocre, Lively, Rough, or Harbor?
If you work at a harbor school, just forget about it. Most of those kids live in the rough and tumble.
For most others, if I am given 15-20 minutes of the lesson to do a conversation section, I make sure it is fun. Not “JTE teacher” fun, “actual fun” with competitions, risk/reward, and a slew of jokes and laughter.
When the kids want to play or they are in a competitive nature and you tell them we have 20 minutes before we have to go back to “repeat after me”, and you suddenly stop the lesson because people are disrupting, the whole class will stare at the problem people, usually that stops them. I usually make and apology to the rest of the class and say we can either move forward in the game or go directly into the reading… “their choice”. Most of the time, that gets the problem students to settle down.
Keep an open mind on some of those disruptive students. Some of the time, they come from bad home lives or are in less than ideal circumstances. You shouldn’t directly single them out, but let the class correct the problem.
But, then again, this all depends on your relationship with your students, your students’ thoughts on your activities, and your overall clout/rizz in the class.
The longer you teach them, the easier it gets. I’ve taught my JHS students since Nursery School/Kindergarten, I have more clout in the class with less power than the JTEs do.
If the classroom is big enough, put him in a more secluded area, he being alone sitting there. The other thing u can do is surround him with people who do not get along with him.
The 3rd thing you can do is give extra homework as punishment to anyone who makes noise unnecessarily. The 4th thing you can do is make him sit beside you ( i.e the teacher’s table ).
There are lots of approaches and lots of methods, but the older I get, the more I rely on just silently doing nothing until the class reads the air. For very young students and students in special situations, I might adopt a different strategy. But after JHS 1 maximum I think students need to learn to control their behavior at least at a basic level.
It is sad when there are highly motivated, highly capable students in the class who would like to plow ahead through the material but we can’t because ADHD-kun in the back won’t stop disrupting class, but that’s usually when I talk with homeroom teachers about student-specific strategies.
I’m at a bad JHS this year. I’ve accepted to just not even bother. I’m the ALT. I’m not paid for this. Their loss. The fighting and bullying is another reason I don’t bother walking around the school.
Today a 1st year student. On purpose, bumped into me, and yesterday a 2nd year boy had his hand down his PM pants and was stroking his junk in front of me. So sick of this school.
I’ve had the most success just keeping my lessons fast pace and being noisier than they are. Being loud and stupid has been the only thing that works with J2s for me. Now if only someone could give me advice on wading through the sea of completely zonked out j3s…
For middle school, if I wrote their name twice on the board, then they had to sit in a side room or maybe next to their homeroom teacher and write an eiken essay. I led one lesson where we practiced writing them and needless to say, after that, I never wrote someone’s name twice.
I tell them I’m going to put them into the younger kids class next door. Usually after telling them that and maybe giving them an extra “final warning,” they stop, but if they don’t I actually do make them go into the other class. After that, they always take it much more seriously the next time I say it.