Handling Annoying, Disruptive, and Dangerous Students

It’s your classroom and you set the rules. But that doesn’t mean students will follow them. If you’re like most instructors you have already encountered students who exhibit annoying, distracting, or even dangerous behaviors. Chances are you will be faced with more of these problem students in your future.

Many see a rise in incivility throughout society, and the college classroom is no different. Difficult students don’t just get under your skin; they also interfere with other students’ abilities to learn. Whether they are texting beneath their desks, carrying on side conversations, or making racist comments in online discussion groups these students damage the educational environment for everyone.

That is why you need effective tools and strategies to manage student behavior. Fortunately you’ll find them in Handling Annoying, Disruptive, and Dangerous Students.

Led by Brian Van Brunt, EdD and Laura Bennett, this 75-minute video seminar will teach participants how to:

• Identify, distinguish, and categorize various negative student behaviors;
• Develop unique intervention and management strategies for different kinds of problem behavior, including annoyances, disruptions, and threats of danger;
• Initiate conversations that lead to positive changes in student behavior;
• Identify when to report potentially dangerous behaviors to a Behavioral Intervention Team or to other campus departments or offices;
• Handle emergencies and other high-stress situations;
• Employ Change Theory techniques;
• Recognize personal triggers and enact strategies to overcome them;
• Use persuasion and body language;
• Defuse, rather than escalate, crisis situations;
• Identify campus resources and determine when to engage them; and
• Appropriately document and report incidents when necessary.

This seminar gives you the tools you need to take control of your classroom and to promote learning without judging, alienating, or demonizing students.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive the complete transcript.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

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Who will benefit:

• Faculty—full time, part time, and adjunct
• Instructors
• Teaching assistants
• Deans
• Department chairs

As if teaching isn’t hard enough, now you have to deal with the added stress incivility brings to the classroom. Learn how to turn problem situations around with a copy of Handling Annoying, Disruptive, and Dangerous Students.

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

How Do I Create a Climate for Learning in My Classroom?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

We’ve all encountered “toxic” learning environments–apathetic students, disillusioned faculty, an entire roomful of people waiting for class to just end, already.

But of course, that’s far from what you (or your students) really want. You want a robust, positive learning environment, in which everyone understands and appreciates why they’re spending time together.

If you have twenty minutes, you can learn how to promote exactly that sort of environment. This 20 minute program will help you transform a classroom from hum-drum to humming in no time flat.

In this idea-filled video presentation, you’ll learn from Dr. Maryellen Weimer, consultant, editor of The Teaching Professor and professor emerita at Penn State-Berks. She shares valuable concepts you can put to work right away in every class.

In just 20 minutes, you’ll learn:

• How positive classroom climates are created.
• Who creates them.
• How they’re maintained.
• Specific ways you can contribute.
• How you can help your students contribute.
• The “pet peeves” of both faculty and students, and how to overcome them.
• What constitutes a memorable, positive experience for students and faculty alike.

A small investment of your time will show you how to create a collaborative, engaged classroom experience that everyone will appreciate.

Order this 20 Minute Mentor

How Do I Create a Climate for Learning in My Classroom? • CD • $99

This Magna 20 Minute Mentor includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Contact us about a Campus Access License to load the CD onto your institution’s internal web site for unlimited, convenient on-demand access to members of the campus community. The Campus Access License is ideal for ongoing group or individual training or to build a library of professional development material.

Unfortunately, the pressures of modern life and recent concerns over the hazards of developing inappropriately close relationships with students seem to be combining to push professors and students further apart. As class sizes increase, the possibility for college students to remain anonymous—and alienated—grows. This situation serves to undermine more than just education; it can also have negative effects on campus safety.

New security devices such as better sirens, text messaging, and warning systems may be useful in combating school violence, but it would be a fundamental mistake for college officials to turn exclusively to a hardware solution to address campus threats. While faculty colleagues looking at the headlines or thinking back to horrific news accounts of campus shootings might feel the urge to withdraw or pull away from students, that is precisely the opposite of what needs to happen.

The main point and recommendation of campus safety research was summarized eloquently in Deadly Lessons, which states: “We could not put it better than the words of a beloved, long time teacher at one of the schools we studied—‘The only real way of preventing school violence is to get into students’ heads and hearts.’” As idealistic as this sounds, it is actually very realistic, practical, and security-oriented advice.

In other words, faculty members and college administrators need to be more engaged with students, not less. This will require some courage, particularly when working with a deeply troubled student, but if it is framed properly, engagement becomes the best security measure. It is important to bear in mind that professors are teaching the whole person, not merely focusing on their brains. Emotions comprise part of the intellectual process, as well.

The absolute best security measure on your campus is to develop a culture of two-way listening where students who have valid concerns about other students, or even about themselves, feel they can come forward and can talk to a faculty member or administrator. Students at risk need to believe that there is a faculty member who is an attentive listener, who seems to care about the students in class and is receptive to talking to them as a guide and as a trusted, helpful mentor.

Unfortunately, most campus tenure and promotion guidelines currently do not reward faculty members professionally for their efforts in getting to know their students personally. This is part of the campus culture that will need to change to promote safety and reduce the likelihood of future violence.

Reference:
Moore, Mark, et al. (2003). Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. National Research Council: Washington, DC. ii.

Excerpted from What Faculty Must Know About Campus Security, a Magna Publications white paper. Learn More »

What Faculty Must Know About Campus Security

Colleges and universities are not immune from crime. While they remain relatively safe environments, horrific campus shootings have taught us that a single, disturbed student is capable of causing devastating violence.

The best way to guard against these rare incidents is not by expanding your police force or updating your alarm systems. What really makes the difference is building stronger relationships between faculty members and students.

When faculty know their students personally, they are able to recognize a student in need of intervention. Other students, with access to worrisome information, are also more likely to come forward and share their concerns with a trusted professor.

While “low touch” security measures like improved alarm systems and text-messaging alerts can be useful tools for addressing a crime in progress, a far better approach seeks to prevent situations from ever reaching crisis levels.

In What Faculty Must Know About Campus Security you will learn why “high touch,” personal approaches to dealing with troubled students are the best way to keep everyone on your campus safe.

Order White Paper

This 42-page white paper draws from the latest reports on campus violence and explains:

• The importance of listening to students
• When to refer a troubled student
• Why focusing on behavior is essential in assessing threats
• How to keep lines of communication open
• The role of mentoring in identifying and preventing possible violence
• How to break through existing “codes of silence” among students
• How the community policing model applies to higher education
• The role of campus security in responding to threats
• The composition and proper functioning of threat assessment teams
• Why profiling is inadequate
• Risk levels posed by students with mental disabilities
• When to involve parents
• And more

What Faculty Must Know About Campus Security is based on a Magna Online Seminar originally delivered by Gary Pavela in 2008. Pavela writes popular law and policy newsletters read faculty and staff at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide. He has been active for over 30 years in managing discipline and student conduct in higher education. He was also a consultant to the Governor’s Task Force on Campus Safety for the state of Wisconsin and addressed Virginia Tech faculty and staff at a symposium sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.

This white paper is important reading for:

• Faculty members
• Department chairs
• Academic administrators
• Campus safety
• Judicial affairs

Cost

You can download the PDF of this white paper, or get the print version mailed to you.

A Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to load the white paper onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Order White Paper

Faculty members are the first line of defense in keeping your campus safe. Learn how faculty members can simultaneously improve their teaching effectiveness while safeguarding the entire college community with a copy of What Faculty Must Know About Campus Security.

While as teachers we may sometimes feel frustrated like Sisyphus whose fate was to continually push a huge boulder up a steep incline with no progress, such is not a satisfactory model for our teaching endeavors. And, although we might occasionally identify with Cassandra who always spoke the truth without any believers, associating our role with her is likewise unproductive. Obviously, some mythological characters are less positive than others. However, I would like to share a helpful one that works for me.

Ariadne is a mythological character who often influences my view of teaching. The daughter of Minos, king of Crete, Ariadne helped Theseus maneuver the palace labyrinth in order to slay the minotaur. She did so by giving him a ball of thread so that Theseus could find his way through the maze. In many ways the process of teaching/learning is like a maze. There are surprises, uncertainties, and dead-ends with getting lost a real possibility. Let’s briefly examine the behaviors of Ariadne that make her a promising lens for viewing our teaching role.

First, she developed a caring relationship with Theseus by wanting to be useful to him. Second, she gave him a valuable tool to be successful. By doing so, Ariadne served as a guide–Theseus still had to go into the maze and come back out again. She did not do the job for him. Finally, her actions modeled problem solving. Ariadne was willing to help Theseus “figure it out” by giving him the means to do so.

As teachers we can approach our role in a similar vein by creating relationships with our students based upon an ethic of caring and service, by equipping them with the knowledge and cognitive tools necessary to survive, and by focusing on the importance of engaging in problem solving.

Functioning as Ariadne in the classroom, we can give our students hints, warnings, prompts, and strategies to overcome learning obstacles. We can help them understand the context of situations through careful analysis. We can encourage grappling by how we pose questions and conduct class sessions. In short, we can shape our students’ orientation to solving problems by promoting an attitude of “let’s figure it out” together.

In the end Theseus abandoned Ariadne on another island. This was a sad part of the story. But as our students depart us, we should celebrate that they have become more independent and know better how to find their way in future learning encounters, i.e., how to safely make it through other mazes.

Patty H. Phelps, Ed.D. is a professor in the department of Teaching & Learning at the University of Central Arkansas.

Sanders and her colleague David White, professor of English at Walters State Community College, serve as mentors for new online instructors in the Tennessee Regents Board Online Degree Programs. One of the concepts Sanders and White advocate is termed “nonjudgmental rigor”—a professional, demanding, and productive environment in which students feel comfortable asking questions and pursing learning.

Her are some techniques they recommend:

Make the course easy to navigate. “If you’re getting two or three messages from your students that say, ‘Where is x?’ the course is not well designed. The onus is on the instructor to make the course clear to begin with,” Sanders says.

Be aware of the online persona you create. “Many people who teach online, especially at first, don’t think about the learner at the other end. They don’t think about how they are coming across in their text, emails, and responses on discussion boards,” White says. The asynchronous nature of most online courses makes it possible to take the time to reflect on each communication with students. You can edit email messages before sending them, take time to compose your thoughts before posting a message to a discussion board, and revise your course year after year. In short, the online persona you create can be an improvement on your face-to-face persona.

However, this online persona should not be radically different from who you are. “As a mentor, I would say, ‘Let’s sit down and talk about what your strengths are as a teacher.’ As you go into this class, we want to build on those strengths, whatever they may be,” Sanders says.

White has developed his online persona during the 10 years he has taught online. He maintains a Word file that contains all the email messages he usually sends to students during a course. This enables him to compose messages with just the right tone and copy and paste them as needed. When other instructors teach his courses, White gives them all his materials, including these email messages, for them to revise and use as they wish. “If an instructor took bits and pieces of my materials and didn’t revise them and sent out another email that was his or hers, there would be a disconnect. I’m sure students would be confused, not by what was said, but by how it was said,” White says.

Set the stage for student interaction. “The first week of class is critical,” Sanders says. “If you jump in there with the introductory week and actually respond to the things students are saying and keep the conversation going, then they’ll have a sense that you’re listening to them. I think it’s better teaching practice to drop out then when they’re doing the real discussions and not to get too involved, because then you end up taking the words out of their mouths. In that [initial] discussion they’re going to find out a lot about you. I don’t mean you need to tell them every detail of your life, but the fact that you’re interested and respectful can come out in that first week.”

Get an objective perspective on your course. White recommends viewing your online course from an “aesthetic distance”—“standing off from your course and looking at it with a fresh set of eyes.” One of the best ways to get an objective perspective on your course is to have another instructor teach it and give you feedback.

Edit yourself. Wait before responding to students if you are angry or upset. Write an initial response, and let it sit for a few minutes. Then go back and edit it. If necessary, revise it a third time, asking, “Did I answer the specific question that the student asked?” “Keep to the facts rather than getting engaged or embroiled in some kind of test of wills. You can do that very easily with email, which is your primary mode of communication, whereas in the classroom you may be caught unawares or you may be blindsided—and of course you can’t edit your performance in class the way you can in an online environment,” Sanders says.

Contact Andrea Sanders at Andrea.Sanders@Chattanoogastate.edu and David White at David.White@ws.edu.