Saying Hello to Challenging Students

I was fortunate recently, to do a TEDx talk about something that I am extremely passionate about: helping teachers and disengaged students to engage, so schools could be safer, and teachers could gain the respect they need. It involved teachers doing something different to gain control: connecting. 

Disengaged students are the students who are often so off track in their lives that they affect others around them. The student in the hoodie in the back of the room who makes remarks or sleeps. The student who concerns teachers and often hears negative responses from the teacher, pushing them to disengage more. The student who walks in with a bad mood, gets disrespectful, and disrupts the classroom.

These students keep our teachers from doing what they love. If they are suspended or expelled, they just move to another place to do the same thing.

No one wins in that process.

Recently, a solution focused school counselor intern did a remarkable exercise in a class where the teacher had struggled so much that each day, she lost her voice from trying to gain control. The school counselor went in and just talked to the students with the teacher there, explaining the teacher’s dilemma of wanting to teach but not being able to. It was a novel way for the students to learn their impact on their teacher.

From there, the teacher talked to the students about her passion. The students listened quietly. Then, the school counselor asked the students what they thought their teacher needed from them to share her passion of teaching.  She filled a whiteboard full of their responses. The students in that classroom were quite challenging and such students are often dismissed as impossible to reach, but I strongly disagree.

By opening a dialogue with such students, teachers can accomplish so much more.

So, on this Monday, consider doing the following, just for this week...

Find the most challenging student in your classes as a teacher, a school counselor or principal and just connect…somehow, connect. Maybe compliment them on their attire, the fact that they came to school despite difficulties, anything.

And do not quit until you find a way in. Approach them daily and spend at least 2 minutes talking to them. 

Doing this will begin to give you what you deserve, such as what the teacher who lost her voice gained, just from connecting and sharing what you love and need from a student.

Instead of a top-down approach to control the situation, you will experience connection, and, as Maslow has always told us, connection and a sense of belonging is at the top of that pyramid.