Post 64: How To Deal With Difficult Students

Post 64: How To Deal With Difficult Students

When I taught online, I have not had to deal with as many difficult students as when I used to teach face to face. When I was teaching face to face, it was all about classroom management and winning the respect of the students. Once students respected you, liked you, and bought into your lessons, then you would have classroom discipline.  There are many ways for face to face classroom management such as the Social Contract where you and your students create a contract whereby you and your students agree to abide by certain classroom rules that you and your students create. Then you and your students all sign that agreement to abide by those classroom rules.

At the beginning of the school year, the teacher is strict and you make sure all students learn the rules and learn to obey the rules. You have to be consistent in reinforcing the rules. No favorites. No teacher pets. Nobody is above the law, or else you have lose credibility and once the teacher loses credibility then you will have no classroom discipline all year. You have to start out strict to get the students to 'respect' you by 'fearing' you. 

Then by the middle of the year, you can slowly let your hair down and become more informal. This is when you start to bond with your students and develop a learning community of trust. Once this trust is established, then learning occurs.  In a face to face classroom, just like in an online classroom, teaching and learning occurs when you are able to create a safe space for students to learn by creating a positive learning community where students feel a sense of belonging to the class.

In an online class, if you build a positive learning community and build trust among your students, just like in a face to face classroom, you can prevent having difficult students. There are several kinds of difficult students in an online class. 1) You have the student acting out and disrupting the class. 2) You have the student having difficulty understanding what is going on in class. 3) You have the student complaining about his grade. (This happens for high achieving and lower achieving students).

If a student is disrupting the class and you are unable to control him just like in a face to face classroom, you contact the person responsible for classroom discipline in the school. Most of the time, you just take the difficult online student aside and email him privately to ask him what is wrong; listen to what he has to say and then try to hash out the problem and tell him that his behavior is disrupting the class, and then tell him the appropriate behavior for the class. 

For a remedial student who is having trouble in class and getting low grades, you can have a one on one tutoring session with the student in Adobe Connect and go over class material in real time. Usually, once I tutor the student in real time, the D student becomes a A or B student.  I also get to know the student better, and we get to bond as teacher and student. Later, that same trouble student comes back for the next class I teach. For me, nothing is more gratifying than seeing my students succeed, and seeing the same students back in my next class!