In the comment made into an article below, Michele offers perhaps the most powerful way of dealing with tough kids yet described on this site:
Let me preface this by saying that I always tell parents at the beginning of the year that they are welcome to visit at any time because they will improve my teaching just by being there. I promise them that I will make the class comprehensible to them whenever they choose to show up.
When I have kids with parents who would be the type to threaten to call lawyers, and several are disruptive, here’s what I do. I start calling parents, not to discuss the kids’ behavior at length, but to say that I’m really excited about what we’re doing in class, and I’d like the parents to attend. When would they be available? Then I call the next one, and the next one. I try to set it up so that I have five or six parents in class over the course of two weeks. That does a couple things for me: first, it makes the parents love me as a teacher. I remind them that they can always come visit any day (best to contact me to make sure we don’t have district testing), and I also tell them they’re allowed to ask for translation using our regular classroom signals. In advanced classes I might assign a kid–not their own–to be their interpreter. That kid whispers in English every time the parent looks at him or her. But usually we dial class back so that the parents can understand every word. They love it, and can’t believe their sudden language aptitude.
Second, these visits make the parents understand why I need kids to follow my rules. Usually by the end of the visit, the kid and the parent are having a brief conversation, because they both figure out that it wasn’t a random invitation. And if not, it makes it easy for me to call again and ask for assistance. I had one mom who decided to come in once a week at least, because she didn’t want her kid derailing me. Besides that, she wanted to learn some Russian!
Third, having parents visit shakes up the seating chart, apart from my every-other-weekly change of the partners and seating (that’s a Susie idea). It gives relief. The fact that there’s another adult in the room helps out.
This works because at least in our school, the “popular crowd” whose parents might be the least helpful and the most litigious is the group whose parents are also most likely to be able to shift their schedules. If a parent can’t come, I ask for any other family members–grandparents, older siblings–and even family friends.
I have also been known to ask for department members and assistant principals to come sit in on class. Like Ben, I get a lot of visiting teacher observers in the room, so we’re used to that, and I love asking a story around who the visitors are and why they’re present. We’ve had the queen of Estonia, and we’ve had parents who need to watch for mice. We’ve also had the truth come out, in cases where the rest of the class is as frustrated as I am with a particular kid’s behavior. But then we always make it into a story in which there is a reason for the misbehavior. I don’t let kids get humiliated in class, any more than they already are for having a parent there.
Last year, I had my first truly impossible kid whose parent would not come in. I took to sending her a note almost every day with the behaviors listed and my response, copying it to the administrator in charge. The behavior never completely changed, but I have that paper trail, and this year if the kid shows up in class and acts the same way, I will be marching down to have his schedule reworked. If something had happened, I would have been able to show exactly what I had done to try to work around it. (This kid’s behavior changed to being appropriate whenever we had visitors, so getting other adults in the room was still a help.)
