Teacher Resources for Classroom Management Problems, Work Refusers, Disruption

ALL-TIME FAVORITE INTERVENTIONS

Take a peek at a sampling of some of our favorite methods and activities, designed to work for children and youth with an array of problem areas, including attachment problems, poor anger control, autism, poor motivation, defiance, Asperger's, abuse, and more. These activities are perfect for both children and adolescents, make wonderful lessons for groups and classes, and provide the anger-reducers and bad behavior-busters you need.
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Want a great activity for adolescents? Need a lesson about anger? Not sure how to help children manage the problems they face from child abuse or neglect? Regardless of your role with children, we have resources that are designed to help you help your students. Here is a tiny peek at our massive wealth of activities, lessons and interventions. Next to most of the sample activities show below, you'll find the source of additional, similar interventions, so if you need more than the sampling, you will know where to turn. Remember that we cover nearly any youth or child problem area, and that we have a vast array of resources to help. We can also help you locate the exact resources you need. You don't have to hunt around our huge site for answers; we can direct you to the specific resource that matches exactly what you need. All you have to do is pick up the phone or click with your mouse. We can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-545-5736 or email us now by clicking here, a new window opens.

An Activity to Teach
The Difference Between "Trying" and "Doing"

The next time a student says "I'll try" instead of "I will," throw a pen on the floor and ask the student to "try" and pick it up. Be sure you don't allow the child to actually pick it up-- just to try. The student will quickly experience and understand the big difference between doing and trying, and this understanding will quickly spread to other students who watch this exercise. Find dozens more interventions like this in our Coping Skills Sampler book. It has a wide range of creative ideas to help students function better emotionally. For details on this book, click here.

Offer an Anger Management Lesson

It can be tough to find ways to communicate lessons about anger to angry children and teens, but here's a fun, fast way to teach about a common anger scenario in many troubled, abusive, angry, hostile, or neglectful families. So, for example, when a neglected child or teen gripes that their mom does this or that, and it makes them mad, so they yell at her, teach the child or adolescent about the bickerbacks. That is what happens when one person bickers, and the other bickers back. Show how it takes two to bickerback, but if the second person doesn't bicker, the bickering may more quickly stop. Teach this lesson: to stop bickering, don't bicker back.

Help Students Realistically
Evaluate Their Need for School or Counseling

When a student says that they're ready to be on their own, ask them to take a very brief quiz to evaluate their readiness. The quiz is called "Are You Ready for a Typical Day as An Adult?" The quiz asks questions such as "Your car breaks down on the way to work. What is the first thing you do?" Few youth will say "Call the boss." They can score themselves from "Ready for Independence" to "Don't Leave Home Without More Education." The full quiz is really quite provocative and compelling. You will find it in our Ready, Set, Go for Independent Living book (click here for details.)

An Activity with Help
for Family Problems

Many children seem excessively dramatic in how they conduct themselves. Those of you who recognize the terms "borderline personality" and "attachment disorder," may see a lot of this chaos and drama. To help reduce the extreme fighting and commotion in families, teach the family to under-escalate. That means that the louder the child gets, the softer and slower everyone else should speak. Normally, people get louder and talk faster when someone is upset, but under-escalation is just the opposite of that. When others get loud, the upset child gets louder and more upset too. With under-escalation, the child may begin to de-escalate, at least a little. This is a good technique for thought disorders, children in crisis, anxious, hyper-sensitive adolescents, hyperactive, ADHD, combative, verbally abusive and angry children and youth too. Be sure to talk s-l-o-w-l-y even though your adrenalin may be racing. This is good information to pass to families. Find more in our A Child's Guide to a Troubled Family (click here for details.)

An Activity to Help Students
Appreciate the Importance of Rules

Ask students to play Tic Tac Toe without any rules. Offer a big prize to the winner. The students will quickly discover they can't play games without rules. Now, repeat in your classroom or group room by allowing a student to assume the role of teacher in a class without rules. Distribute food, radios, etc. and allow the students to involve themselves in problem behaviors while the role-play teacher attempts to teach in this class without rules. The role-play teacher will soon demand and make rules. Your students will have crafted and requested the rules you end up using to manage your classroom. Instead of fighting these rules, they will have created and feel ownership of these guidelines.

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THE ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS

Q: I've got autistic children, attachment disordered, Asperger's, lots of problem areas. Can these interventions be used with autistic children, youth with autistic characteristics, attachment disorders, other problems?

A: Our methods are so engaging, colorful and captivating that they can sometimes provide you the varied tools you need for autistic children, and youngsters who display autistic behaviors. Because we mine every access point to a child, our techniques are infinitely adaptable to many, many populations.
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Especially since autism is not well understood, you may want to expand your array of methods to include varied techniques from our resources that might work with your autistic children and youth. However, many of our most colorful and unorthodox techniques are in our books and workshops, not on our site,

where we tend to display interventions that can be described in just a few sentences. (Many of our more colorful and creative interventions require more details than can easily be posted online.) Our varied techniques include games, contests, quizzes, art projects, challenges, and scavenger hunts, as well as methods that use the eyes, ears, mouth, touch, and are experiential. Because the interventions utilize an endless array of contact styles, you may improve your chance of "reaching through" the autism. The same concepts would apply for abused children, including those currently dealing with child abuse. All our methods are designed to try to help the student "overcome" any barriers or any challenges the child is dealing with. All our lesson books, including the popular Temper and Tantrum Tamers (shown here), click to view are easily adapted to virtually any youngster. Often, the lessons will require no adaptation at all. The key element for the disorders you mentioned is that you use a vast assortment of approaches until you discover what works best. We have the broad array of methods that you need.

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MORE FAVORITE INTERVENTIONS

Chances are that you use verbiage a lot. Did you know that students only hear about 10% of what you say, and they only stay tuned in for about 30 minutes. Don't you think it's time to retire some of the verbal approaches that haven't been working for a while, and replace them with methods that can grab students' attention and hang on to it for more than a mere half hour? Remember: you are supposed to choose techniques not based on what methods you like to use or want to use. You are supposed to choose based on what works best with students. That truth can put a whole different spin on how you interact. Check out these lively alternatives to just talking.
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Help Students Manage Serious Family Problems

Students may have little energy for their school or work site when family problems overwhelm them. Have these youth sort their problems into "Things I Can Change" and "Things I Can't." Initially, many youth may claim to be able to change family problems like drinking and hitting. Inform students no one can change anyone else, just their own self, then have them re-sort their problems. Many problems should shift from "Things I Can Change" to "Things I Can't," freeing more energy for school or work. Counseling for the family problems should also be offered. Even our posters offer you interventions that can help. Poster #28 is a great example (click here for more details on posters.) For children who are completely dismayed by their circumstances, you can consider teaching them to "bloom where they're planted." The perfect follow-up intervention: have the child illustrate the concept using art, poetry or other media.

Assist Students to Make Good Decisions

Use this device during times when another public figure has been caught in illegal or immoral behavior. Before the child engages in a problematic behavior (or after the child has done a problematic behavior), ask "Aren't you smarter than a governor...president...senator?" (Just insert the title of the most recently disgraced public figure.) This intervention will usually get you a big grin from the child, and may also get the child thinking. Or, to help students make good decisions, try a passive intervention like one of our most popular posters, Poster #31, shown here. Click here for details on it. This poster may be able to accomplish more than mere words can. It can actually put your walls to work. The poster may gnaw at the child while you think the youngster is just staring into space. What's really happening is a non-verbal approach is creating change when mere verbiage can't.

Help Students Build Motivation for School

It can seem like nearly every child-- whether facing a thought disorder, Asperger's, family crises, attachment problems, ADHD, apathy, or facing hardly any barriers and challenges at all-- thinks that school is pretty unimportant, and that only nerds do well or care about school. Here is a very quick and fun intervention that works with so many different children and youth that it may work well with your students. These next intervention is said as a joke. Say to the unmotivated, apathetic child: "What do you call a nerd in 20 years?" Answer: "Boss." If you like this intervention, we have many more lively, engaging methods to build motivation and enthusiasm for school. Some of our most compelling techniques are in our Turn On the Turned-Off Student book, shown below.

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PROBLEM-KID PROBLEM-SOLVER TIP

Got so many "kid problems" that it seems overwhelming? Are you wondering where to start to turn it all around? Those are typical concerns that we get all the time in our Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop. Believe it or not, there is an easy way to figure out your starting point.
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To begin to tackle all the problems without feeling so overwhelmed, follow these steps: First, write down all the concerns you are seeing in your office or classroom. Next, prioritize them. Typically, safety and attendance are top priorities, but you may decide differently. Finally, tackle your top three priorities first, then move down the list as each area shows clear improvement. See how easy that was? Now, instead of feeling overwhelmed, or worried that your class or group is completely out of control, you are focusing on just a portion of the problems a few at a time. The big picture may be overwhelming, but by addressing just manageable pieces, the job seems more do-able, doesn't it?

You are probably also trying to figure out how you work with so many different types of kids at one time. Our methods were designed to work with a wide array of troubled, abused and problem youth. So many times, resources are aimed at a tiny portion of the varied population you serve; that's part of why you may be struggling. You may be attempting to stretch a few approaches to work with a big cross-section of kids and problem areas. That's like trying to get all your students to wear the same size jacket. It's just not practical. You will find that if you will incorporate targeted methods specifically tailored to work with that broad cross-section, you will get much better results. Think of the array of problem kids you see: neglected, assaultive, aggressive, physically abused, attachment disordered, autistic, sexually abused, verbally abused, kids with bad behavior, anti-social, Aspergers, FAS, FAS-effect (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome), adolescent adjustment reactions, emotional problems, thought disordered, emotionally disturbed, behavior disordered, adolescent depression, withdrawal, anxious, truant, defiant, unmotivated, hostile, special ed, learning disabled, English Language Learner (ELL/ESL) and more! When you consider the scope of the problems, it becomes clear that one-size-fits-all methods may fit almost no one. Test some of the targeted approaches from our site, and watch how much more quickly you get the results you wanted all along.

One last fact that may apply: youth professionals tend to use the same five approaches over and over and over. Think how far you are stretching a mere handful of methods to work with your huge assortment of students and problems. As you look through our delightfully different, more targeted methods, you will be finding the varied remedies you need to fit the varied young people and problems you see each day. A favorite resource for students who are big behavior problems in school is shown below, but we recommend that you choose resources by matching the problems to the remedy. If misbehavior in school is a top problem, then The Last Chance School Success Guide shown below is a good option-- but only if it fits your priority areas. Remember, focus on just those top three problems at one time. We're here to help if you need us. Call 1-800-545-5736 or email us. A-Z, from ADD to Bad Attitudes to Conduct Disorders to Defiance to Zero Interest in School, we can help!

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