Here are the three areas to tackle. First is skills. Few schools have a plan to train kids to be students. You can have big kids who don't look, act, or sound like students. You can have little kids that don't look, act, or sound like students. Either way, you are working with untrained, unprepared youngsters. That's a good first step: to stop assuming that kids have a clue how to behave at school. Teach them everything from how to show up on time, to how to talk to the teacher, to how to raise their hands, and so on.

If you have very difficult students, skip to the second or third steps, which are to build motivation and a positive attitude about school. "Can't be done," you're thinking. If you use conventional methods, you're right. If you use compelling motivation-makers and bad attitude-busters, then you may be able to transform your students' negative outlook on education. How do we know? Because our methods were created and tested with students just like yours. Don't you think that you would be working with entirely different young people if your students actually believed that school is more important than the air they breathe? Of course, they would be different if they believed that. That's what our unusual, hard-hitting interventions can do.

Take a look at Poster #2, shown here. If you want to see a larger picture of it, click here. Poster #2 is a good example of a powerful intervention that can begin to convince even the most negative youngster that school may be important. (You don't need to buy the poster to use this intervention; just read the poster and use the information on it.) No one intervention will turnaround your students, but by using a variety of more effective interventions, you can really have more much impact than conventional methods-- such as talk and sanctions-- could ever achieve. If you tackle all three of the relevant areas-- skills, attitude and motivation-- you may begin to get more of the results you wanted all along. After all, you signed up to teach; you didn't sign up to spend your career fighting for control of the classroom. For nearly 20 years, we've been helping teachers get back in charge of the classroom, and back to teaching, and we can help you too. You might even start to love your job again.

These three areas are just the start. The other aspect that you need to address-- that we won't cover here-- is how to match your interventions to the types of students you are teaching. That's not information we can condense into a small space, but, for example, you would use radically different methods with a conduct disorder (your most misbehaved student) vs. a fragile, shut-down youngster. If you don't know how basic mental health information, and how to match your techniques to your types of students, that's something you will need to catch up on at some point. If you don't know a lot about your most misbehaved students, conduct disorders, learning about that youngster is absolutely critical. Our books and classes cover this child, but you can get an introduction to this impossible-to-manage youngster by clicking here. Whenever you have an extremely out-of-control classroom, you probably have at least one conduct disorder who is radically ramping up the problems. You can't use conventional methods with conduct disorders. There is no other option: You need to learn basic mental health information about this difficult student if you are want to get back in charge. That's why our top way to help you with an out-of-control classroom is to have you come to a live workshop, because that's where we cover it all.

So, for serious, prolonged classroom management problems, we prefer to have you come to a live Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop because that way we can hear from you the exact problems areas you are facing, then we tailor the entire seminar to offer you targeted solutions. Our workshop roams the U.S. in both fall and spring each year, and is probably coming soon to a city near you. We actually customize each live workshop to fit your exact needs, and to solve your exact classroom management problems. Click here for information on the live workshop option. Note that we always have half-price work study financial aid slots available if you have a bad budget. We give out those slots only by phone, so call us for details at 1-800-545-5736.

If you can't come to a live workshop, our recorded class is the next most comprehensive option. Click here for information on that solution. Our books and ebooks can also help you. Two of our favorites for reversing serious, on-going classroom management problems are shown below, or you can click here for details. They are available as books and as instant download ebooks. That means you can be reading your problem-stopping ebook in as little as 60 seconds.

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