3 Common Mistakes & 4 Tips to Deal with Poorly Behaved Kids in Teaching

Education plays the essential role in grooming a kid and to become a good and productive citizen. But it is possible when the teachers are also qualified to transfer the knowledge. In this post, I will share a few common mistakes that teachers make and a few solution to deal with poorly behaved kids.

1 – Never Give the Children Instructions

It is a classic mistake for a beginner teacher to enter a classroom on the first day of class, stand in front of a chalkboard to face a group of perfectly mute children, give a lot of instructions in complicated language, thinking that children are too simple to understand the instructions.

A teacher who does this on the third day of class, not a single child will pay attention. When the kids are explained how to do and what is expected of them, they may have a hard time understanding the instructions. As a teacher, you have to understand the dynamics of the exercises much more clearly first by doing it all together. For example:

If you give them an exercise in which they must complete a sentence with an adjective, think what the most appropriate approach is for each case. Instead, read aloud the first sentence (suppose it is ‘The dog is _____.’) And look at one of the best pupils putting ‘What’s the dog like?’ Expression will say ‘big’ or ‘small’, and then ask another, motivating him/her to say something different, and so on.

2 – Never Play at the Beginning of the Class

It is very easy to get children to activate, and it is very positive that they learn to play, but there are exercises and dynamics that must be done calmly and quietly; such exercises should be done at the beginning and not at the end of the class.

The explanation is simple: Once you activate a group of children, it is very difficult to calm them. Once they start playing, they will not want to stop doing it. Not only do they relate concentration exercises to something more boring than those involving singing and dancing, but it also costs them a lot to move from a state of activity to a state of calmness. On the other hand, moving from calmness to action is easy for them. If you have to follow a syllabus that includes text exercises, you better do them at the beginning of the class and reserve the games for the final as a reward.

3 – Don’t Yell & Threaten Constantly!

No matter how great a teacher you are, there are always times when children get out of control or misbehave. Only with years of experience and talent, you can control a group of children masterfully, but wasting your shouts and threats is not the way to achieve it. As a teacher and a mommy blogger, it is important to know that threatening the children will do nothing but get them scared of you..even to cooperate.

One technique for gaining group control is by playing games like ‘Simon Says’, but there are times when you simply want to ask them to keep quiet.

Children can be very noisy, so the natural reaction of a teacher is to raise his/her own voice, so that he/she can be heard. This approach works the first time, but it will lose its impact if repeated constantly.

If a teacher raises the voice, the children will increase the volume. What you should do is to lower the voice and dominate the group with body language rather than being verbal. It means that the teacher must move around the class, sit the misbehaving and noisy children just look them in the eyes sternly and say ‘Shhhhhhh’. Once done, you should look at the class the same way and make ‘Shhhh’ the whole group.

5 Tips to Deal with Poorly Behaved Kids

Let’s see the solutions to deal with misbehaving and noisy kids in your class.

I – Separate Them from Friends

Tell the poorly behaved child patiently that you feel that being close to your friends is very distracting, and you regret having to change your seat. But you are doing it because you want to help the kids to learn better. Tell him/her that when he/she is calmer and knows that he/she can continue with the class behaving correctly, he/she can return to the friends.

II – Take Away a Few Minutes of Recess

To a child who has not finished his/her work because of behaving badly, tell him/her that unfortunately he/she will have to stay in the class to finish what he/she lacks. If you leave the whole group, ensure you have warned before that if they do not finish all their work, nobody will leave to play. If you have a child who, on the other hand, ends up very fast and begins to distract others, it is because he is bored. So, you must give him/her funny hobbies as a reward for having worked quickly and well.

III – Stars and Happy Faces

An excellent method of group control is to start the course by giving all students 5 stars next to their name on paper. Each time a student behaves very badly, strike a star, when crossing the fifth star the student must know that you will call his/her parents.

Happy faces are achieved at the end of a class if the student behaves well all the time. The happy faces should be drawn on the same paper as the stars. Each time the student gets 10 happy faces, it recovers a star.

IV – Dismiss the Kid from a Game

Rarely, when a student misbehaves, exclude him/her from a game he/she likes to play with the rest of the class. Explain that you are very sorry to have to exclude him/her from the game, but it seems unfair that you play with the rest of the classmates if you do not deserve it.

Ensure the kids understand why you are punishing him/her, and if the kid understands, he/she will agree that he/she deserves punishment and will learn its value.

I hope you have got a clear picture of how you can deal with kids and school them better. In my next post, I would discuss law dissertation writing tips, so keep visiting this site or subscribe to stay updated with the latest post-publication notifications in your inbox.
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