If you ask educators what their pain points are, they will likely list student behavior and classroom management as being at the top of their list. So how can they effectively respond to these issues? Don’t worry, we have you covered. In this short piece, I will discuss 6 strategies for challenging student behavior and mastering classroom management.

Self-regulation is the capacity of a person to manage their thinking, emotions, focus, and actions to accomplish long-term goals. If you teach your students to self-regulate, they will be able to control their actions and fully participate in the learning process. If you are teaching young children, you may have to employ the strategy of co-regulation, which is the process by which a child and his or her caregiver/teacher share the child’s emotional regulation until the child can take ownership of managing his or her own emotions. For older kids, you can teach them the advanced skill of cognitive behavior modification, which is the process of changing one’s conduct and habits through methods based on behavioral and cognitive principles, including self-talk and self-instruction.

Teach your students, adaptive behavior skills, which are social, practical and conceptual skills that children must learn to perform everyday routines and activities. This will help them behave and function more appropriately in your classroom management system.

If you can’t figure out the source of a child’s challenging behaviors, you should conduct a functional behavior assessment (FBA), a method for using direct and indirect information to understand the motivation for and emotional factors causing a student’s problematic behavior to determine the best means to address the behavior. This will give you the information that you need to create a behavioral intervention plan, a strategy for changing the normal program for a young child who presents troubling behavior.

Develop a strong family-professional partnership, which is a relationship between families and professionals working together toward the best outcome for a student in a spirit of trust and mutual respect. Since it is in a parent’s best interest to assist you in reinforcing rules, consequences, and routines, they will gladly help. Have parents to fill out a behavioral questionnaire, which will help you solicit input from them concerning their child’s behavioral challenges. You can ask parents to help you with effective behavior modification by using home-based reinforcement strategies. For instance, one strategy would be for the teacher to report student’s behavior in school to their parents who in turn give them some type of reward.

Add the premack principle to your classroom management tool kit. It is a strategy that uses activities that kids enjoy as a bribe to entice them to participate in activities they find less enjoyable. “Do A, and I will allow you to do B.”

Sometimes harsher methods may be necessary, and you may have to punish the student. Punishments are consequences meant to be displeasing or unpleasant which are used to weaken behavior or deter an individual from certain conduct in the future. There are several types of punishment that you can employ as a deterrent to challenging behavior. The first is presentation punishment, which is the use of unpleasant or displeasing stimuli to reduce the reoccurrence of a particular behavior by causing an individual to avoid the behavior in the future. The second is removal punishment, a technique in behavior modification which takes away a pleasant consequence that reinforces a behavior to reduce the reoccurrence of the behavior.

What strategies do you currently use for challenging student behavior and mastering classroom management?