Teaching Problem Students

This uniquely practical resource and text focuses on how teachers and school practitioners can improve the academic skills, attitudes, and coping abilities of students with behavior and adjustment problems. Presented are findings from the Classroom Strategy Study, which identifies widely used classroom management strategies that work--and those that don't work--for addressing a wide range of specific challenges in the elementary and middle grades. Integrating his own research with the relevant developmental and educational psychology literature, Jere Brophy provides detailed guidance for meeting the needs of individual students while maintaining an effective, supportive learning environment for the whole class.

An innovative, thoughtful, and theoretically grounded text that would be helpful to both beginning and experienced teachers. Current efforts to relate teacher preparation to classroom environments through interactions with classroom teachers in professional development settings would benefit greatly from this text. The problems Brophy selects as his focal points for improving classroom teaching are real, compelling problems faced by all teachers in all environments. The research base for his work is most impressive, and the melding of theory and practice throughout the text is a major strength. This text makes an important contribution to the field. --Leigh Chiarelott, PhD, Bowling Green State UniversityTeachers will rush to read Jere Brophy's long-awaited Teaching Problem Students. In this remarkably helpful book, drawn from the findings of the Classroom Strategy Study, Brophy addresses 12 types of problem behavior commonly exhibited by students which reflect difficulties with achievement, relationships with teachers and peers, and student role. Utilizing the responses of identified expert and average teachers as well as principles derived from empirical research and treatment theory, he walks the reader through the diagnostic process and describes successful intervention strategies as well as longer term preventive practices. The value of this book lies in the recognizability of these students, in the voices of a broad range of teachers, and in the rarely integrated literature on effective interventions with different types of student problems. Because successful approaches are presented alongside of defeating strategies, readers are literally forced to re-examine their own thinking and actions. Teaching Problem Students will hopefully sensitize teachers to the underlying roots of student problem behaviors and encourage more differentiated and ultimately more effective ways to facilitate student learning and development in the classroom. --Rhona Weinstein, PhD, Dept of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley - A compendium of the best of educational research and wisdom regarding instruction of problem students....Would be an excellent primary or secondary text for classroom management and could serve as the basis of inservice training or teaching study groups. --Intervention In School and Clinic, 7/31/2003ƒƒ This book is not merely a general strategy that promises to solve all of your classroom management problems. Instead, it is an all-inclusive set of descriptions of specific types of problem students and effective strategies that teachers can use to manage and cope with specific problems. I classify Teaching Problem Students as a necessary resource for teachers in today's complicated classrooms. --The Science Teacher, 7/31/2003

Jere Brophy, PhD, is University Distinguished Professor of Teacher Education and formerly Codirector of the Institute for Research on Teaching at Michigan State University, East Lansing. He has published widely on teacher expectations, teacher effectiveness, classroom management, student motivation, and other topics in educational psychology and research on teaching.