The ProfHacker Post is Not Ours.

Note: The short selection from the Billie Hara article "Disruptive Student Behavior" is not any part of CollegeMisery.com. One of our writers merely commented on it and linked it so others could read it. Hara's article is from the ProfHacker blog, which is associated with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Darla wrote: Good grief. Two different colleagues forwarded this link to me today. I'll just post some flava, and then if you want to totally be annoyed, click through to the rest. Guess who she's talking about in point #2.

from Hara's
website.

Disruptive Student Behavior: The Entitled Students
By Billie Hara

As higher education professionals, we have conversations with friends and colleagues about our students. We’ve all done it. The conversations can include how engaged students are with course material, how interesting classes can be when students participate, or maybe we’ve passed along a particularly funny exchange with students. We love what we do, and we want to share that joy. But then there are the other experiences, experiences we don’t readily share because we don’t quite know how to handle them. Or, we don’t share them because we don’t want our colleagues and friends to know that we can’t handle the situations. That’s what ProfHacker’s “Disruptive Student Behavior” is all about: it gives us a space to discuss—calmly, respectfully, and sometimes anonymously—how to handle difficult situations with students.

This series has a few caveats:

1. In this series, we will present a few scenarios, and it’s clear that how we handle these scenarios depends upon the discipline, the class size, and the culture of an institution. We try to include as many of these variables as we can, while understanding that we can’t account for every situational difference. What we are discussing here are behaviors that—no matter the discipline or the institutional culture—impede learning for other students.
2. ProfHacker is not a place to complain about students in any mean-spirited sort of way. That is not what this series of posts attempts. Instead, we want to focus on what we can do, positively and professionally, to handle the sometimes-difficult situations we can have with students.

The rest of the professional advice.