These are five secrets to deal with difficult students that will help you to keep your peace of mind. Difficult students give us the opportunity to become better teachers. They force us to learn new strategies and add more tools to our toolbox.

Every teacher dreads having to deal with that student who is a behavioral issue in their classroom. If you’ve ever had to deal with this or are dealing with this, make sure to keep reading. I will give you five secrets that will turn your difficult student into a classroom star.

1. During your classroom instruction, your focus should not be on that one difficult student.

If your time and attention is placed on that one difficult student then other students will start to follow the negative behaviors of that student.   Instead, focus on the students that are demonstrating the behaviors that you value in your classroom and the difficult student will follow suite.

Difficult students with issues such as temper tantrums and fighting, need to be explicitly taught how to self-regulate or calm themselves down.  As a teacher, I have had numerous students who simply escalated small issues into temper tantrums because they didn’t know how to calm themselves down.

I had a kindergarten student who was very bright but had lots of temper tantrums. I kept telling my student calm down, calm down when they had tantrums. One day he said to me, I don’t know how to calm down. It was like I had an AHA moment.

From that point on, I had specific steps on an anchor chart on how a student should calm themselves down when they needed to.

2. Teach all students in your classroom conflict resolution skills

When I was a new kindergarten teacher, my students were constantly bickering and fighting. They were always coming to me to resolve minor issues that I knew they could deal with, ex. Tattle tailing. I wanted them to stop coming to me during my small group reading instruction. It was very frustrating.

I had to find a way to resolve the problem because my small groups were being cut short. I researched on the internet and couldn’t really find anything. I thought to myself, if I need to teach my students routines and procedures, then I need to teach them how to resolve conflicts.

 I found a simple to use framework and taught it to my students. One of my classroom jobs was a peer mediator that rotated on a monthly basis. It took some time for my students to adjust but I got to conduct my small group without students constantly interrupting.

3.  Communicate with parents about the strategies you are using to help deal with the difficult student.

Talk with parents about the difficult student’s behavior on a consistent basis. It is very helpful, especially when the student has a great day.  This will make the parent feel that the strategies you implemented are working. They will want to implement them at home.

The student will feel great because their parent or guardian is proud of them when they may have only experienced communication when the child is not doing well.

4.  Make it a point to celebrate in small ways when a difficult student has had a great day.

When having students self-reflect at the end of the day; I give a extra special dose of excitement when it’s a difficult student that has had a great day. 

For example, I’d say, let’s give a big round of applause to student… and the smile on that student’s face is just priceless.

5.  Document, document, document.

If you have done a number of strategies and they haven’t worked then consider going the intervention and referral services route or the framework that your district use