Troublemakers (Part 3 — Ideas for the classroom)
In Part 1, I discussed my classroom troublemaker and set myself the task of finding out more about the topic. In Part 2, I looked at organisational psychologist Adam Grant’s theory of givers and takers through the lens of education. Here, I will suggest implications of Grant’s ideas, and potential applications for the classroom complete with links to materials.
First, let’s remind ourselves what a taker is by looking at Adam Grant’s definition:
Let’s now put this in an educational context, and for the sake of argument, assume that our troublemaker is a taker. In my teaching context, I have to teach English to both adults and children. While behavioural issues are obviously more prevalent in younger students, we can use Grant’s ideas to consider the dynamics of adult classes too. For example, an adult taker may be intrinsically motivated to improve their English, but they are willing to do so at the expense of others in the class, perhaps by dominating discussions or asking for special treatment.
When it comes to deciphering the motivations and short-term gains of younger learners, things get a little trickier. Rather than coming to class with an intrinsic desire to learn English, their main motivations may be:
- to have fun
- to socialise with their friends
- to get through the hour/day as quickly as possible
These young takers are happy to keep chatting to the person next to them when the teacher is trying to give instructions because their short term satisfaction is more important than their relationship with the teacher, or with any classmates who actually want to learn/are being respectful/have realised that listening to the teacher has longer terms pay offs.
Dealing with troublemaking takers
So what can be done? Let’s start with Adam Grant’s advice and see if we can apply it to the classroom.
- Find Bright Spots: In his Medium article, How To Change A Selfish Person’s Stripes, Grant reminds us that someone who is selfish in all their decisions is called a sociopath. As true sociopaths are rare, our troublemaker is likely to have what Grant calls Bright Spots, i.e. areas of common interest. Like 90% of the boys I taught last year, the troublemaker in my class was a fan of the computer game Fortnite. This would have been a potential bright spot for me to use in class in order to build empathy. This could come in the form of framing questions, can you give be a comparative about playing Fornite? Or by designing activities that use the game’s characters, or allowed the student to talk about them.
- Give reputational feedback: This is essentially telling the troublemaker that you know, or have heard, that they have a tendency to cause trouble. This could be done one-on-one, or in front of the class, depending on the situation. Grant recounts this story about woman called Kathy who outed a colleague on her new team after she had got a promotion. Upon taking control of the team, she was told by several of its members that this person was untrustworthy. Kathy’s solution was to deal with this head-on by telling the employee she had heard negative comments about them, “I don’t know whether it’s true or not…But I don’t work well with people who operate that way. If this is who you are, you are not going to like working with me.” This might seem harsh, but I find it easier to understand when I remember that takers are indulging themselves at the expense of the others in the group. Similarly, I have levelled with teenagers before in my best Teacher Voice™, explaining that, by disrupting the lesson they are literally stealing their classmates’ time and their parents money. However, as true as I think this statement is, I often feel like I’m wasting my breath by saying it. In fact, I think Kathy’s approach might be counterproductive with students, especially teenagers. Yet, perhaps we could learn from this to be more proactive at the start of term, rather than giving reputational feedback reactively, i.e. telling off a student later in the year. I’ll discuss how we might do this in a sensitive way below.
- Understand their goals: I suggested some of a young troublemaker’s goals above, ones which didn’t align with the teacher’s. The point here being that you should try to identify what their goals are and how they work. Then, this will allow you to predict and hopefully manage their behaviour better. If I know that the troublemaker’s main goal is to chat with his friends, then him talking over me is predictable. If it’s predictable, it may help me engage my own empathy and perhaps I’ll find it less irritating. Even more crucially, his misaligned goal then needs to be managed in some way: this is when you can’t talk, and this is when you can. Depending on factors such as age, or teaching style, this could be done through negotiation and reasoning, or in a more authoritarian way. If you’re dealing with an adult troublemaker you might say: I know you are excited about learning English, but the other students need to have the opportunity to speak in class too! Where this strategy would fail is with much younger kids. Their goals might be similar to the teens (having fun/to get back to their parents asap), but reasoning is not really an option. Teachers of very young learners need to have strict systems in place (and I’ll point you in the direction of some of these at the end of the article. )
Practical applications and classroom activities
Here it comes, the moment you’ve all been waiting for/care about: the practical activities. In Part 2, we looked at the idea of getting students to write their own user manuals, and I’ve designed for some materials for this here:
But how else can we apply Grant’s ideas about givers and takers to the classroom? Should we be sitting down and writing Gs and Ts next to our students names on the register? Well, that might take some explaining if the students see your register, but I’d also be concerned about the ethics of diagnosing and pigeonholing all our students. Quite apart from the ethics, it’s not particularly practical either. So here are three tools I’ve developed which relate to Grant’s three ways to deal with takers.
- Why are you here? (Understand student goals)
All three of Grant’s ideas (above) stress to me the importance of getting to know your students. If they have been a student of the school before, one place to start is by reading their reports. Unfortunately, these are sometimes sugarcoated by teachers or educational management. In this case, often internal handover notes are more useful. More useful still would be to speak to the previous teacher about the students.
Once you’ve got some background on the students, you need to start the course in a robust way. That means a thorough needs analysis, establishing classroom norms and rules. I’ve been doing all these things for years now and they work. Where I’m going to go a stage further this year, is by establishing the students expectations and goals. This is the type of thing I’ve done with business students, or one-to-ones, but not so much with teens classes. I’m going to start by using a questionnaire like this:
I’ll encourage students to be honest and tell them that their answers won’t get them in trouble. One way to do this could be to make it anonymous, but there are drawbacks to this as well, e.g. not being able to give students individual feedback. Either way, the teacher needs to follow this up and be sharing their own objectives, deciding with students if they think their shared goals can meet in the middle, and how this could be done. For example, if a student admits they don’t want to be there, you can discuss why. What is it they don’t like about English classes, and can that be changed. If they’d rather be playing football with their friends, fine, but if they are being forced to come, they have no choice, so they might as well try and make it more enjoyable for themselves.
While I think this could be an important activity to include in your first lessons, I’ll admit that it seems a little dry. So why not spruce it up by setting it as a running dictation!
2. The ideal student and the ideal teacher (Reputational feedback)
This activity seems to be pretty popular at the moment. It’s one I’ve used and I think it’s a great way of encouraging a bit of empathy between both parties. It also works as a lead-in when establishing classroom rules and may even give us a few clues about potential givers and takers.
The activity can be set up in different ways, but usually involves students writing down qualities they think make the ideal student and/or teacher. They can then discuss them with other students before giving feedback to the teacher. The results are often quite surprising or insightful. The teacher would then ideally have some of their own ideas of what makes the ideal student to compare with the class’s ideas.
Remember when I talked about gathering information from previous teachers? Well, bearing in mind Adam Grant’s story about Kathy, the twist I’m going to add this year is to include quotes about the students from their previous teachers in my ‘perfect student/teacher’ activity. However, first, we have to be mindful of the fact we are not dealing with cutthroat business types here, but quite probably young adults who don’t know any better. Unlike Kathy’s naming and shaming, I’ll be keeping things anonymous, e.g. He/she never did their homework. He/she never brought their book. The students will be given discussion questions, something along the lines of: did this cause a problem for the teacher/other students? Why do you think the student did this? Obviously, if a colleague has highlighted a potential troublemaker, I’ll be including a quote that relates to that student.
As you can see, I’ve softened it by adding positives quotes too, e.g. She was happy to help the other students. Why so cautious? Well, there is a fine line here between setting boundaries, and potentially poisoning the classes before you’ve even started, by blaming them for crimes committed in the previous academic year. Certain students (I imagine, class-clown-agreeable-takers) may even relish being identified as an instigator and wear it as a badge of honour. Also, who knows? The student may have outgrown the undesirable behaviour, or maybe the problem was more to do with a misunderstanding between the student and their previous teacher. The key here is not to read them the riot act, but to raise their awareness of what you deem to be desirable, unhelpful or unacceptable behaviour.
And if the fates are kind to you and you have no warnings from colleagues, or you’re not in the position to get this kind of information, then why not just make the quotes up?
3. Student wizards (Bright spots)
I’ve taken a couple of ideas here, smashed them together and added my own geeky twist. Firstly, the students will have to think of a topic that they are experts on (their bright spots). They will see some examples.
Then they think of their own. They will then complete a card which establishes this as their mastermind topic, or in my case wizard power. (Feel free to choose something better suited to your class: geniuses, samurais, Pokemon). Younger kids can then draw their avatar or magic symbol.
Next, the students will brainstorm various mistakes they make in English and/or various grammar points. Their second topic, or power, will be one of these. The idea being, that they either are, or will be, masters of this grammar point by the end of the year. The completed cards should then be collected by the teacher and collated in some way. I’ll be going with a poster.
There are several purposes for this activity. Firstly, we now have a database of Bright Spots. Next time, you ask Laura to give you the answer to an exercise on past simple, you can say great, now can you give me a sentence about K-pop using the word ‘last week’. Or you build the fact that you know she likes K-pop into a classroom activity: talent show, music review, etc. The second purpose is that now you have a champion for various language points. Not only is it the student’s responsibility to become an expert in this by the end of the year, but they now have the power to correct a classmate whenever they make the mistake. Peer correction can often be a messy business with younger learners, but what if your student is only listening out for third person ‘s’. They are surely going to be much more likely to shout out/raise their hand/suggest in feedback that their fellow student made that one mistake they were poised to hear.
The final benefit of this idea is that it can be made into the traditional Mastermind activity. For example, once a month, the students will come up with a list of questions for a chosen student based on their topic and their grammar point. The student will then be put in the hotseat and quizzed on all things related to K-pop and third person ‘s’. The teacher can keep a record of the student with the most points, and at the end of the year, award a prize to the winner. Your one-off card making activity has now become a repeatable no-prep 30 activity which can be used throughout the academic year. Magic!
Should they stay or should they go?
Hope you found the activities useful. Send me a message and let me know if you used them in class. However, before I wrap up, there’s an outstanding question to be addressed: troublemakers, should they stay or should they go? This was the million dollar question that I started these articles with.
If a teacher is in a context where they can permanently exclude the student, does that mean that they should? Well, I’ve done my utmost to put my gut feeling aside, and to consider the alternatives. I’ve stressed how vital it is to put measures in place at the start of the academic year, rather than wait until a problem arises. If that doesn’t work, there are likely to be further options available to teachers with genuinely disruptive students: disciplinary procedures, punitive measures, speaking to your school’s educational management, sitting down with the student’s parents, or even moving the student to another class.
But what if there’s still a problem? If the director of a school is completely confident that the teacher has done everything in their power, and that they have exhausted all the other options? If this is not the student’s primary education, but part of their extracurricular schedule, should the director of a school ask the student to leave. I’m afraid, in my opinion, the answer is still ‘yes’.
Taking my cues from Grant’s diagnoses of teams in some organisations being completely incompatible, I’m going to say that exclusion in a teaching context can be fair, because it puts the other students in the class first. It prioritises their time (and money) over the disruptive student’s. It’s also sensible from a business perspective (1 paying customer vs. the others) and from a more holistic perspective (the happiness and well-being of the other students, and of the teacher).
The fates were kind to me last year. That one troublemaker really wasn’t all that bad. Would my class have been better without him? I’m sure of it. But I never even reached the stage where I had to speak to his parents (though I was close). I hope the fates are even kinder to me this year. It would be nice to reduce the troublemakers from one to zero. However, I feel like I have increased my understanding of why a student might be causing problems, and I’m armed with several ideas about how I’m going to prevent and address it, before I have to consider these more drastic options.
How well will those ideas work? I guess I’ll be back later in the year to share my thoughts and findings. And if you use any of the activities I’ve shared, then please return the favour by sending me message over at the ALMAR Facebook page and let me know how you got on. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome!
Further resources
Finally, I said I’d point you in the direction of help for very young learners, and here it is, or rather, here she is: Karen Muckey, a.k.a. The Kid Whisperer. Like me, Karen believes that troublemaking needs to be addressed proactively, by putting careful systems in place. I urge you to see her if she’s speaking at a conference near you. You can click here for one of her handouts that explains a bit about her approach. All I can say is, it works.
Alternatively, if you want to know more about dealing with teens, I can point you in the direction of another speaker based in Spain, Chris Rolland. He’s released a new book, Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom, and while I haven’t got my hands on a copy yet, I know Chris’s material well enough to give it a preemptive plug!
