Challenging Students in the Learning Environment

Concerns Relating to Challenging Students

The classroom environment comprises different kinds of students from various backgrounds and with differing academic potential and performance. However, students’ behaviors and academic performance are impacted by various factors including poverty, divorce, and dysfunctional family. Actually, these factors enhance a student’s potential for school difficulties though they do not assure it. Nonetheless, teachers need to understand that these factors do not behaviorally or academically impact some students while others are significantly affected by them. This understanding implies that teachers need to change their beliefs that these home situations or factors contribute to a student’s school difficulties. Through this, teachers enhance their interventions and efforts towards creating a safe learning environment for all students to thrive academically.
The difference in the impact of home situations on a student’s behavior and academic performance is attributable to the student’s understanding of these situations. According to the findings of a recent study, some children are negatively affected by these situations while others are not because of how they understand these situations (Science Daily, 2013). If the student blames him/herself for these home situations, he/she is likely to be impacted behaviorally and academically. The behavioral and academic impact emerges from the fact that such blame affects the student’s emotional status. Additionally, exposure to such home situations causes mental health problems on some students and not others depending on their understanding of the situation. Given these factors, I would change a teacher’s belief that these home situations cause a student’s school difficulties by asking him/her to examine a child for any mental health or emotional problem. Moreover, I would encourage the teacher to interact with the student to examine his/her understanding of the home situations and their impact.
Importance of Training All Staff the Same Problem-Solving Process
An important component towards establishing a safe learning environment is conducting training of all instructional, related service, and administrative staff in the school. However, it’s important to ensure that all the staffs are trained using the same data-based, functional assessment/problem-solving process. Conducting the training using the same data-based, functional assessment/problem-solving process helps in creating consistency on how the school staffs handle the various concerns and challenges facing students. The consistency is critical towards ensuring a positive and successful classroom management approach is utilized in handling students’ problems. As a result, such training enables all staffs to play a critical role in maximizing the emotional, social, academic, and behavioral progress of all students through a positive and successful classroom management framework (Project ACHIEVE, 2011). This essentially means that training all staffs using the same data-based, functional assessment or problem-solving process creates an integrated approach for handling students’ issues.
The integrated framework or approach emerging from such training enhances the delivery of early intervention services since instructional, related service, and administrative staffs are adequately prepared to detect and deal with students’ issues. Improved delivery of early intervention services is attributable to the fact that the provision of such services is not limited to a specific group of staffs because every staff has capability to address student problems. As a result, the training also lessens the number of referrals to the school’s multidisciplinary team and the number of special education assessment and determination over time. Unlike in a school setting where students’ issues are addressed by specific kinds of staffs, training using the same process for all staffs implies that every staff in the school is better equipped and prepared to deal with these issues, which lessens the number of referrals.
References
Project ACHIEVE. (2011, October). Integrating the School Prevention, Review, and Intervention Team (SPRINT) and Response-to-Instruction/Intervention (RtI2) Process: A Model Implementation Guidebook for Schools and Districts. Retrieved September 19, 2017, from http://www.projectachieve.info/assets/files/pdfs/RtI%20Model%20Guidebook%20Project%20ACH%20Final%20101511.pdf
Science Daily. (2013, May 8). Why Family Conflict Affects Some Children More Than Others. Science News. Retrieved September 19, 2017, from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130508092835.htm