Today "Peter" struggled to go along with the flow of a writing lesson I was teaching and completely shut down. He disengaged in the lesson entirely and began to be disruptive to the rest of the class because he was angrily muttering about how not being about to do things his way was stupid, but his mutterings were loud enough to cause the lesson to be stopped so I could momentarily address it and attempt to correct the behavior before my MT needed to get involved. My attempt to correct the behavior was unsuccessful and my MT inevitably did have to get involved to allow the lesson to come to completion. This event was due to regular behavioral issues with this student that I have been aware of since before the school year started and, with the help of my mentor, we have been taking steps to try to combat and cope with these behavioral issues with this student.
My MT addressed "Peter" individually today and was able to get him back on task and engaged in the lesson. I don't know what exactly was said to "Peter" that got him refocused and participating in the lesson, but since this is a semi-regular occurrence with this student my MT and I both have developed strategies for getting "Peter" back into a learning mode and while our individual methods differ slightly they are both successful in refocusing "Peter."
This particular event was a great exercise in classroom management for me and helped me to realize that I have to improve my classroom management plans and come up with some good ways to refocus students who lose focus during a lesson.
This also seems to be a good example of forming relationships with students and using those relationships to manage behavior, especially when the problems are reoccurring. It's important to have a repertoire of teacher "moves" that can be used to gently refocus students during instruction; unfortunately, sometimes, of course, this minor moves don't work. In that case, it seems like the most effective strategy is to work something out with the student individually, as it seems was the case here. For example, individual routines or "signals" can be worked out between teacher and student.
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