Managing Behavior Problem

Managing students’ motivation in class could be related to handling behavior problem. Last meeting of MMSEL course was about managing students’ behavior problem.  The presenter shared about students’ behavior problem based on its type. There are defiant students, aggression, bullying and violence.

1.      Defiant students usually tend to badly resist the rule because transitional of human development and defense of assigned personal image. This kind of student often skips the class, refuses teacher’s instruction and disrupts the class. What teacher can do for handling this behavior problem is by losing temper, using calm neutral voice to give instruction or using silence to ignore the student.

2.      Aggression here is as an attempt to harm another individual physically or socially which is influenced by emotion variable such as anger, irritability, resentment and attitude variable such as negative view, cynicism, mistrust and suspiciousness. How to handle this kind of behavior is by telling them it is unacceptable, identifying where and when a student is aggressive, teaching conflict-resolution skills, school counseling and letting aggressive students use their energy in positive way.

3.      Bullying happens when a more powerful student hurts, frightens, or intimidates a weaker student continually. It can be done through verbal bullying, physic, indirect bullying, social bullying, intimidation and cyber bullying. How to handle this is by implanting respect value among students, raising awareness about bullying and its effects and raising students’ confidence for the victims.

4.      Violence is any behavior that violates a school’s education or climate with the intention to be free from aggression. Violence is started from a small thing like putting downs, insult, threats, and trash talk. Yet, it can be grown into fighting, sexual harassment, drugs and other crime behavior. To minimalize this potential of violence there should be family based program that can improve family relation. It might happen because of lack-relationship between the children and their family especially parents. Social development strategies can prevent violence by letting students know how to deal with social situation.

I have had experience as students since I was in elementary school. Many situations happened. Some were because of technical problem such as teaching and learning system or schedule, but most were caused by behavior of school members especially students.  Most of the problems were caused by defiant students who did not want to obey school regulations. Mostly the teacher always gave warning directly to students who caused problem in the class. Not only problem that is caused by defiant students but also bullying. I have encountered a teacher who bullied the students by physical bullying. He used ruler or his hand to hit students’ cheek when they could not answer the question. As the result, most of us studied hard to remember the materials before the class started. Other teacher did not do anything about it. Even until I graduate from the school, it still happens.

Behavior problem will always happen on children. What we can do as teacher is by doing efforts to manage the situation in order to prevent unintended situation to happen.  The strategies could be by teaching students about self-regulation, practice stress management, promote tolerance, and provide space and activity that can help students develop their self-potential. It is also important to build awareness about behavior problem to the entire of school members.