I dread the moments when I look out into a classroom and see a collection of blank stares or thumbs clicking on tiny keypads: a pool of disengaged students, despite what I thought was a student-centered activity. Recently, I have been considering how teachers (me specifically) undermine our own efforts to engage students.

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the whitepaper Coping with Seven Disruptive Personality Types in the Classroom. This post deals with the narcissistic student.

Managing students who are disruptive, those who lack motivation and appear as though they would rather be any place than in the classroom, is easier when faculty take the right stance. Anything is possible when faculty have faith in the students they teach. Learning starts with a dedicated teacher interested in meeting the challenge of how to present content in a way that successfully navigates the barriers students erect.

Kiren Dosanjh Zucker makes a great suggestion in an article on office hours we’re publishing in the March issue of the newsletter. She says that if you grade participation, you might consider letting students “participate” by coming to see you during office hours.

There’s something about the unannounced quiz that’s awfully punitive, probably reinforced by the way many instructors use them. Pop quizzes occur when there aren’t many students in class or when the class doesn’t appear to be well-prepared. They do get more students coming to class having done the reading but students are preparing because there may be a quiz—that’s different from daily preparation motivated by the understanding that regular interaction with the material helps learning.

Students can and do regularly disrupt the classroom. Sometimes they are openly hostile, challenging the teacher’s authority and objecting to course requirements and classroom policies. More often, the conflict grows out of their inattentiveness and passivity. They arrive late, leave early, talk during class, and don’t even bother to hide their boredom.

The first day of class is an important time. In addition to the usual housekeeping tasks that need to be accomplished, there are other critical functions – not the least of which involves setting the tone for the course.

Most instructors attempt to encourage class participation by making it part of the overall grade. But evaluating individual contributions and promoting a substantive, intriguing discussion at the same time is no small task. Consequently, many instructors end up evaluating participation subjectively, relying on an intuitive sense of who spoke, how often, and saying what. Besides worries about the objectivity of such a system, this approach “forces the instructor to adopt two fundamentally incompatible roles simultaneously: the support role of creating learning opportunities in the classroom, and the evaluative role of grading participation every time a student verbalizes his or her thoughts.” (p. 24)

In last Wednesday’s post, Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant, the authors of the newly released CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do, recommended steps faculty can take to reduce cheating in their classroom.