Challenging Behaviour and What We Can Do about It

Raise your hand all those who've experienced first-hand disruptive behaviours in their class! We've all had the students who just won't stay in their seats, who'd talk out of turn or those producing sloppy work. Some of us have had to even deal with openly rebellious students, disrupting classes with clownish parodies, breaking rules, distracting classmates or simply bonding with other rebels. Other unappropriate classroom behaviours are: retreating into walled silence, resisting their instructor's best intentions or getting to master the art of pushing your buttons, but also getting to extremes such as becoming a danger to themselves and/or others and so on.

Where does challenging behaviour originate from?

When a farmer sows his field, that land – just like a blank mind – accepts the good seeds just as well as the bad ones and nurtures them all into either nourishing grains or poison. The field has no judgement of what it receives.

Equally, our brain takes in both positive and negative input, just as we feed it, just like a sponge takes in water, good or bad.

The question then is … whose responsibility is it to select and plant the seeds into a fresh human brain? Parents and teachers alike are responsible for swaying a young mind – in fact, everybody who influences the thinking of another person – be it a young child or an aging adult, has the responsibility of sowing the good seeds, if we are to enjoy a good community together.

While growing up, a child learns to become independent by gradually selecting his/her sources for new learning. Challenging behaviour is the result of selecting the wrong kind of seeds to sow into one’s brain: instead of getting to master the art and intricacies of maths and reading or writing from their teacher, students can choose to learn the rhetoric of intimidation and the manoeuvring of chaos creation from their challenging colleagues.

The WBT way to tackle challenging behaviour in the classroom

You can download the manual below directly from the website, or you can read on and familiarise yourself with the Big Seven - the daily instruction routines: Class-Yes, the Five Classroom Rules, Teach-Okay, the Scoreboard, Hands & Eyes, Mirror, and Switch.