Dealing With Difficult Behaviors in High School
“I’m never going to use this, so I’m not doing it.” Some form of this comment is spoken in my high school classroom at least once a year, and for me as a teacher, dealing with this kind of difficult behavior is, well, difficult.
Building relationships in your classroom is a must. Not only your relationships with students, but their relationships with each other. If your students respect and care for each other, they will step in to help a peer before it gets to a point where you need to get involved.
But let’s say you’ve done all the things that educators are told to do. What do you do when you’re faced with a challenging behavior that is not necessarily a referral, but still disruptive? Here’s a list of dos and don’ts for teachers who find themselves dealing with these situations.
Chocolate chip cookies offer important lessons about HQIM
A time-honored family tradition is making chocolate chip cookies; not the premade dough you slap in a pan (although that works in a pinch), but the joy of baking from scratch.
There’s something almost reassuring about the process. Pull out the flour. Measure the sugar. Crack the eggs. Add the vanilla. Mix in the baking soda. Finally, it’s time for the ingredient everyone has been waiting for: chocolate chips. Yum!
There’s a recipe for a reason. Imagine that halfway through making the cookies, someone decides the recipe could use some improvement.
“What if we add ketchup?” Technically, we can, though the result may not be what we want.
Or what if our family decides vanilla extract is boring and peppermint extract sounds more interesting. We could make that substitution too. The result might even taste good.
But then we’re no longer making the chocolate chip cookies the recipe was designed for. We’re making something else.
That is the challenge with high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM. High-quality instructional materials are not simply collections of lessons. They represent carefully designed instructional systems.
Why Speaking Up Doesn’t Always Make You More Visible
Two people speak up in the same meeting.
Both say something worth saying. One of them gets heard. Someone then repeats the point back an hour later and credits them by name, and by Thursday they are in the follow-up conversation. The other person gets barely a nod, and the conversation moves on.
Ask anyone who was sitting there what the difference was and you will get a shrug. Something about presence. Something about confidence. Nothing you could write down and practice on Monday.
But I’ll suggest it’s none of those things. The difference is not the words, and it is not the delivery. It happened about thirty seconds before either of them opened their mouth.
If you have ever walked out of a meeting knowing you said something important and were still not heard, that gap is likely what you were feeling.
Which States Test English Learners in Their Native Languages?
Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia offer standardized assessments in languages other than English, according to a 2025 analysis by researchers at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank.
States aren’t required to offer these native-language assessments, but researchers say these tools can help educators understand English learners’ academic knowledge by removing language barriers. (These students also take separate, mandated assessments focused on English-language proficiency).
Even as research points to the benefits of offering native-language assessments to English learners, availability of such tests varies by language and state.
Many Teachers Are Bored in Team Meetings. Here’s How to Keep Them Engaged
Elisa MacDonald’s first day as a teacher in the mid 1990s was unusual.
She had applied for a job with a public school in Boston but never heard back. That is, until the school’s secretary frantically called her, asking: “‘How fast can you get dressed?’ she asked me,” said MacDonald, recalling how she learned that she had the job. “That was my first day.”
The surprises didn’t stop there. Early in her first week, MacDonald was asked to lead a team meeting with unfamiliar colleagues and assigned to lead the group for the whole year. MacDonald was told to simply “slap an agenda together,” but she knew that wasn’t the best use of teachers’ time. As she led more meetings, MacDonald realized that team meetings needed a revamp—shifting from a boring, bureaucratic exercise to a space where adults could learn, practice new skills, and share experiences.