Of all the issues that face us (teachers) today, behavioral understanding and intervention is the topic that seems to garner the majority of our attention. At the end of the day what seems to drain most of our energy is dealing with the one or two students in the class who are constantly disruptive. We may even imagine what it would be like if these couple of students weren’t in our otherwise ‘good’ classroom.

Reality is there will always be those one or two students that draw most of our behavioral attention and energy. It is the social balance of all classrooms. Now this does not mean that we simply must resign ourselves to feeling frustrated, stressed and tired at the end of the school day when dealing with these behaviorally challenged students. Knowing what drives and motivates these students is the key to working effectively to help control and ultimately change the behavior of these students into more socially acceptable behaviors.

Most of us are well versed and confident in our ability to teach core academic subjects because this was an integral part of our undergraduate training, however, how many of us received in depth training on social, emotional and behavioral interpretation, understanding, recognition and intervention? Yet every day in our classrooms we are expected to recognize, interpret, understand then remediate problem behavior. I liken this to being asked to fly a jet when our formal training was on how to repair one. The results would most likely not be successful or pretty.

To effectively deal with and make positive changes in our difficult students we must know about their World View and Self View. This is the beginning stage to understand human beings and why they react the way they do.

So, if you are one of the many teachers who would like to gain a better understanding of dealing with problem students I would strongly suggest taking formal coursework on behavioral theory and/or psychodynamic theory. I would also suggest holding off on taking classroom management courses until after you have a firm understanding of social behavior.