ScholarChip

How to Handle Disruptive Classroom Behavior with Management Techniques

In a poll by the American Federation of Teachers, 17% of teachers said they lost four or more hours of teaching time per week. Another 19% said they lost two or three hours. Twenty-four percent of urban-based high school teachers reported they lost four or more hours per week. Why? Disruptive classroom behavior.

Some children are wreaking havoc in school. There are many reasons for these behaviors: More and more are coming from troubled or chaotic homes; and antisocial behaviors like showing no remorse, being verbally or physically abusive, aggressiveness, and defiance exist. All of which can result in school safety issues.

Any of these can potentially ruin successful schooling and life after school for these students. Even activities like talking in class, tardiness, and cheating can prevent classmates from receiving the attention they deserve.

Your teachers are overwhelmed and need specific interventions to improve their students’ behaviors.

Superintendents: You’re Up to Bat for Your Students and Teachers!

Let’s face it. You have to go to bat for your students and their teachers. Disruptive student behaviors have far-ranging implications: students won’t do well in school, and their positive outlooks once they leave school can be dim.

But you know you have even more challenges. You’re experiencing problems with low graduation rates and troubled kids who may not graduate. And if they’re showing disruptive classroom behavior, they may be out of school to begin with from suspensions. That’s leaving you with significant drops in attendance. Those add up to possible—or already occurring—losses in funding.

To add insult to injury, you have to reduce your reports of bullying, harassment, fighting, and violent behaviors, not to mention support your teachers who are losing teaching time from disruptive classroom behavior.

Finally, you need to receive reports of improved student behaviors and school performances, and stay up-to-date with possible solutions to greatly improve your schools.

There are behavioral interventions that exist to help you out with your schools’ most pressing problems of disruptive classroom behaviors.

Social and Emotional Learning: Teaching the Whole Student

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, is a vital part of a student’s education that leads to positive outcomes across the board: improvements in student behavior, reductions in disruptive behaviors, and greater overall academic achievement. It uses a series of five competencies that go beyond traditional learning and that occur in the classroom.

SEL teaches students how to resolve conflicts, empathize, handle emotions, and make responsible decisions.

Let’s look at SEL’s core competencies.

1. Self-awareness
With self-awareness, students learn to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and develop strong senses of optimism. As they learn these, they can become happier in and out of the classroom.

2. Self-management
As students learn self-management, they learn how to manage their stress levels and control impulses that can lead to disruptive classroom behavior. They are taught goal setting and how to achieve them. When they have these abilities in place, they can begin to work toward personal and academic goals, and positive outcomes are the result.

3. Social awareness
Today’s schools are seeing an increasingly large number of diverse student populations. In 2014, 50.3% of students were identified as coming from a number of backgrounds. These included:

  • Black
  • Hispanic
  • Asian
  • American Indian or Alaska native
  • Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Island native
  • Other Non-White group

Why is this relevant? Empathy.

SEL’s social awareness recognizes that students need to understand and show empathy toward others from diverse backgrounds and cultures different from themselves.

4. Relationship skills When it comes to behavior, many students have an inability to conform to the standard social norms. With relationship skills, students learn to communicate clearly and listen well, and cooperate well with others, whether they’re other students, teachers, counselors, principals, or their families and friends.Students also learn to resist inappropriate social pressure, negotiate conflict constructively, and seek and offer help whenever it’s needed.

5. Responsible decision-making When learning responsible decision-making, students work to make constructive choices about their personal behavior toward others. They develop skills to identify specific problems and analyze the situations to resolve the problems. From there, the student works on improving their social interactions based on social and safety norms.

As a result of SEL, teachers have seen wide-reaching effects. The Penn State Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported that using SEL programs have far-reaching effects such as:

  • Greater academic achievement
  • Reduced conduct problems
  • Positive social behavior
  • Reduced substance abuse
  • Reduced emotional distress

Automated Behavior Technology for Disruptive Classroom Behavior

Alternative Behavior Educator (ABE) is an online learning management system that provides behavioral, evidence-based interventions in the classroom, addressing school discipline problems. It makes specific corrections for problem behaviors, so students spend more time on-task, resulting in positive behavior changes.

ScholarChip’s ABE uses visual and audio programs that are designed with each individual student who has received a referral due to disruptive classroom behavior. The programs use age-appropriate, video-based tutorials, quizzes, and games that address over 50 targeted, offense-oriented behaviors.

At-risk students are flagged before behaviors can escalate, and ABE can identify, monitor, and chronicle them throughout their school careers.

ABE uses positive reinforcement throughout its individualized instructions, offering positive reinforcement, rewarding students when they reach desired behaviors. Students are given three attempts to achieve success. In the event they don’t pass, a referral is made for additional help.

With its automated daily emails, its user-friendly, and actionable data, ScholarChip’s ABE tracks successes or failures with teachers, parents, administrators, superintendents, and even school boards. Referrals become less frequent and teachers experience more positive classroom interactions and a return to more teaching time.

According to Dixie County, Florida Schools Superintendent Mark Rains, he would recommend ABE to any district who wants a program and a systematic process of dealing with student behavior, discipline, and the data it produces in a positive and effectual way. He explains, “After the first semester of using ABE, our teacher-generated disciplinary referrals dropped 52% and our OSS assignments decreased by 40%.Hitting a home run

You need to successfully provide your teachers with ways to eliminate disruptive behaviors and restore learning time to their classrooms. In teaching the whole student with SEL’s core competencies and using ScholarChip’s ABE, these interventions help your students achieve greater academic achievement and fewer negative behaviors. ScholarChip’s ABE shapes the overall performance of your students and schools.

You’ve just hit a home run!

To learn more about how ScholarChip can help you handle disruptive classroom behaviors through the use of management techniques, reach out to schedule a free one-on-one walkthrough session with one of our specialists today!