Friday 2 November 2007

Handling Miss-Behaved Students

Do You Have "Miss-Behaved" Students In Your Class?
Almost every teacher has experienced these situations; "a student keeps on chatting with her friends", "refuses to do tasks given", or even "goes out without permission during the lesson". Nearly all of us have to handle students with unpleasant behaviour in their classes. We do need some strategies to handle such students, especially when the students are in GE levels or those in adolescence.
During this stage, the adolescents need extra attention from others because they are making a strong effort to answer the question "who am I?". They try to find the answer by learning everything from their social life, including family and school.
Losing parents' attention, getting bad effect of technology and modern lifestyle have stimulated them to disobey the class' rules, or to get teacher's attention with wrong ways. I still remember clearly my conversation with Adrian, my Basic 3 student in SMA, as follows;

T : ....You said you lost your workbook?
Well, it means you have to pay Rp 20.000 to get the new one, right?
S : ....(smile), well actually it's not lost, Sir, I just left it at home.
I'm just too lazy to bring it to school. It's too heavy...

Another cause is a fact that the existence of ILP in class is just an additional lesson. We can analogize if English in High Schools is a “dinner”, ILP is not “the main course”, it is just “the appetizer” or even just “the dessert”. It seems that ILP doesn’t play an important role in students’ assessments. ILP doesn’t decide whether a student passes the exam or he has to repeat the same class. This fact often makes low-motivated students be more stubborn because they do think that ILP won’t influence their score in final test.

Problems & Solutions.
1. Separate The Class.
Bad behaviour is just like a “contagious disease”, it spreads easily and gives bad effect on the infected ones. A good student , let say his name is Dian, can turn to be “naughty” when he is surrounded by “miss-behaved” students. Different condition will be seen when Dian is a real good student with strong motivation. He will surely be annoyed by his “miss-behaved” friends’ attitude during the class.
To avoid this, putting them in a special class will be helpful. However, this classification must be based on students’ motivation, not based on their achievements.

2. Consult With Class Teacher & Principal.
First, we can get the information about some students from other teacher, for example from their class teacher. The information given to you will be your reason to build a suitable teaching strategy. If there’s something we can’t handle, report it to our principal before taking further steps.

3. Give Them Special Treatments
Because ILP is different in many ways from conventional schools, we also should create different strategies from what conventional teacher do to handle “miss-behaved” students. We can’t waste our energy and time just to push our students with bad behaviour to behave well like the good student Dian with the very common way; getting mad all the time.
Not being mad doesn’t mean that we ignore them. It means we can think of another strategy based on the following two facts;
• “Miss behaved” students don’t like restrictive things and rules. They accept the result of agreement rather than rules. What I mean here is involving those students in making rules. For example, we can say this; “Okay class, just as usual… Since you are having a test, you have to submit your workbook next meeting. Let’s decide the punishment for those who forget to bring the workbook. Any idea?”
• We don’t have to get rid of them. “Naughty” student is also a student. He or she has the same rights with other students in the class. It means he is still under our responsibility. We can’t hate our “miss-behaved” students just because they are naughty. We don’t have to give up easily.

4. Prepare Ourselves.
The preparation here emphasizes on our mental preparation. We are trying to make this “appetizer” as the right thing that stimulates people to eat the main course, or to make this “dessert” as a nice-closing menu that will make a dinner perfect.
Besides preparing ILP’s PPP, we have to be ready and able to get along with such students. Sometimes, we have to be their friend because they obey their friends more than they obey their teachers. A friendly-small chat before or after lesson can break the ice and lead us to get close to our students, and then we can pursue our pedagogy that we have already learned from our colleges and ILP’s Teacher Training Program. And finally we can give them lesson according to the fun of PPP.