Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Students

No matter how strong your classroom management is or how many strategies you have in your arsenal, you will eventually have difficult students who, despite your very best efforts, stretch your patience. Daily. Sometimes these challenging students have severe behavioral and emotional issues or chaotic home lives. Sometimes they mean well but require a lot of attention and emotional energy. And sometimes, it’s just a plain personality mismatch: you push each other’s buttons.

No matter what the reason is, these strained relationships can make even the most mild-mannered teacher miserable and dominate your overall impression of an entire school year. So what do we do? How do we cope with these extra-challenging students?

Your First Steps

The most important place to start is getting support for yourself. On a personal level, you need encouragement and advice. Find a friend who will help you keep your head above water, preferably another teacher who can relate in ways that no one else can, no matter how well-meaning.

But more importantly, get support from your school site. Talk to the student’s counselor, email the students’ other teachers, reach out to any special education case carriers or support providers, and bring an administrator into the conversation. There are often significant issues in this student’s life beyond the classroom, and you’re likely not the only teacher struggling. You may, though, be the only one speaking up about it; we all know addressing the issues of difficult students can be time-consuming, and some teachers would rather ignore it or suffer through it in silence.

Case carriers, counselors, and parents can provide insight into the student’s life that helps you understand the situation and respond differently. Other teachers may have found strategies that help the student succeed in their classrooms. The best thing you can do for the student and yourself is to work with a team, both in providing the varied resources this student needs and in establishing consistency throughout the school day.

Changing the Way You Think About Difficult Students

As hard as it can be in the heat of the moment, try to humanize the student. The more you can remember that you are both human beings, struggling to get through each day, the longer your patience lasts, and the better your odds are for improving your relationship. You start to see them with compassion rather than as an enemy, which softens your approach.

Look for the good, and comment on it when you can, even if it’s small. As you develop an understanding of the student, personalize the way you work with them: maybe you can work together to come up with a plan that allows you both to coexist and move forward without turning every day into a battle.

But even as you strive to understand the situation and care for the student, establish boundaries and stick to them. Allowing a difficult student to bend and break every rule for the sake of avoiding an argument doesn’t help that student in the long run, allows you to be manipulated, and isn’t fair to the other students in the class.

Showing Empathy

Look for ways you can show the student you care. If you realize this student faces challenges at home, consider providing needed supplies instead of continuing to penalize the student for not bringing them. Consider storing snacks in your cabinet for a student who needs to work off weeks’ worth of detentions or turn in a massive amount of make-up work. Offer to sit with the student one-on-one during work time in class one day to help them complete an assignment.

Not only can these gestures address some of the student’s underlying issues, but they can also thaw hostilities and help you get to a place where you can work together. If you find something that works, share it with the rest of the support team, trying to improve that student’s chances of success throughout the school day.

A Practical Suggestion

One of the easiest, yet often most significant, things you can do is move that student out of your eye line when you construct your seating chart. Most of us, whether by instinct or training, put students with behavioral issues in the front row where we can easily monitor them, hoping proximity will squash problematic behaviors. For many students, this works. However, if you have an antagonistic relationship with a particular student, seating them right in your face can make things worse instead of better.

The close proximity may encourage them to aggravate the situation further. This doesn’t mean you should relegate them to the back 40 and hope you never see them again. Instead, choose somewhere that is in close proximity, but not right in front of you. It can be helpful to put these students near the front but on the periphery. In these types of situations, you often aggravate the student as much as the student aggravates you. It is likely you have both become overly sensitive to every single behavior because it’s right in front of each of you. Giving you both some space can help keep tensions from dominating every classroom interaction (and reduce the tension in the classroom overall).

It is likely you have both become overly sensitive to every single behavior because it’s right in front of each of you. Giving you both some space can help keep tensions from dominating every classroom interaction (and reduce the tension in the classroom overall).

A Different Kind of Difficult

Sometimes, your especially challenging student isn’t actually a poorly behaving student. Sometimes it’s a student who is just very needy. They want you to check every. single. sentence. of every. single. response. They have questions about everything. They need constant reassurance that they’re doing the assignment right, or they want you to tell them “how to start” or “how to say” every sentence of an essay. As much as we want to help students who clearly want to do well, this can take a toll over time, especially when you have a room full of 39 other students and a to-do list that seems impossible to surmount.

When this behavior becomes chronic, and not circumstantial, consider setting limits on the number of questions that students can ask per day or the number of responses (or sentences or paragraphs) you’re willing to check. Not only does that help preserve your sanity, but it really is in that student’s best interests: the closer a student is to attending college, the more they need to be able to check their own work, work through challenging questions, and demonstrate confidence in their own abilities.

Remember This

Finally, give yourself some grace. If you teach middle or high school, you may have upwards of 200 students every year of your career. That’s thousands of teenagers. It’s inevitable that you’re not going to get along with all of them. You’re both imperfect people trying to get through a situation neither of you wants to be in: do your best, but don’t beat yourself up for the bad days. Then shake it off and try again tomorrow (and perhaps start a countdown until the last day of school, when you get to part ways).

We know we haven’t covered everything: these are just some of the strategies we’ve found helpful with more than a few students over the years. What did we miss? How do you manage especially challenging students in your classroom? What have you found works for THAT difficult student? We’re all listening. We all benefit from learning new strategies and techniques for this often prickly part of classroom management. Start a conversation with your PLC. Email us or DM us on Instagram. We’d love to know your thoughts.