Do you have students that disrupt your lessons? The class clown, the one who just shouts anything that comes to mind? Or maybe they just don’t stop talking to the students around them, and don’t participate in your activities. Either way, they’re a bad influence in your class.
If you don’t keep a constant eye on their section of the room, you’ll soon find that six or seven students have all been distracted by their antics. Or worse, the entire class has lost interest! But what can you do? If you’re an ALT or even an Eikawa teacher, it’s probably been drilled into you that you cannot discipline the students. That’s the purview of the Japanese teacher or not your job.
Instead, you have to deal with the behavior indirectly. Rather than assigning a punishment, you can use these classroom strategies to mitigate the disruption and carry on teaching from there.
Why is my student being disruptive?
There’s no single answer for why a student is being disruptive. Sometimes it might be something you can address–perhaps the student is struggling with English and acts out due to boredom and an inability to comprehend what’s going on.
But as often, it might be poor discipline from other teachers, and this student is regularly disruptive because other teachers don’t hold them accountable. It may be a case of special educational needs that haven’t been addressed. Therefore, while trying to address the disruptive student’s issue may be helpful, sometimes the best you can do is use the following strategies to keep the disruption to a minimum.
Stop and watch
This method works best when only one or two students are disruptive and the rest of the class is focused and interested in your lesson. When your student starts being disruptive, stop abruptly and look at them. Don’t continue the lesson, but just wait.
The idea here is twofold. First, the student will realize that the lesson has stopped and understand they have been caught or they’re causing the class to stop. But even more, the goal is to use the other students as motivators to behave. Eventually, especially in very fun classes, the other students will grow frustrated with the constant pauses and push the disruptive student into not interrupting your lesson.
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- External Link
- https://gaijinpot.com/
9 Comments
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Marc Lowe
As a scholar and professor at elite universities, I can clearly state that this is so idiotic. The ones who disrupt are non-conformists and exactly what Japan needs. The twerlve years of ES, JHS, and HS here are all about conformity and compliance, which creates corporate drones easily manipulated by the government and employers. The so-called disruptive students should be praised and encouraged to become great leaders like Elon Musk, Masayoshi Son and Tsuyoshi Shinjo.
Yrral
Marc ,have you got a grant for your harp in the sky
M3M3M3
-Marc Lowe, this week
-Marc Lowe, last week
wallace
The University of Willy Wonka.
Patricia Yarrow
The stop and stare at the disruptive student is proving to work for me.
Wish I could read the rest of this article, but the external link just goes to a useless gaijinpot webpage, and not the rest of the article.
wallace
The link goes to the whole article
https://blog.gaijinpot.com/tips-for-managing-disruptive-behavior-in-english-classes/
Sven Asai
Everything is fine, as my job is to teach 100% of the paid time and provide the knowledge of that lesson at 100%, that’s my job and that’s exactly what I do. And that doesn’t include additional gimmicks like being the big entertainment artist, playing the strict school principal or their parents or teaching of human behavior and good manners or making unpaid overtime work as a children’s psychiatrist. They sit there to hear and learn something as their job and I fully provide it as my job. If that doesn’t fit to one or another, then those few shouldn’t sit there and waste their or my time.
geronimo2006
I think many Japanese teachers just carry on with their chalk and talk regardless of what students are doing in the room.
commanteer
Uh...no. That would describe a minority of the disruptors. Most are just kids with the attention span of a gnat, the curiosity of a brick, and a constant need for reassurance. If they were that clever and disruptive at the same time, they would have already quit school.