Managing student behavior is a perennial teaching challenge—and one novice teachers invariably feel unprepared to face, amid rising reports of class disruptions, student mental health problems, and teacher stress.
“We learn so many strategies and the importance of meeting every single student’s needs, but once you’re in the classroom and you have 25, 30, or even more students, you’re just on your own,” said Kasandra Medina Torres, a first-year, 1st grade teacher at Loder Elementary School in Reno, Nev. “It’s just a lot to manage when not having the actual skills quite yet.”
Helping aspiring teachers build better student discipline strategies has the potential to improve teacher retention and reduce exclusionary discipline for students, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
On Tuesday, the group released a new framework calling for preservice teacher education programs to give aspiring teachers both explicit instruction in behavior management techniques and opportunities to practice responding to challenging student behaviors before they enter the classroom.
For the last three years, teachers have cited student misbehavior among the top causes of low morale in Education Week’s State of Teaching Project. More than 1 in 3 teachers reported student behavior was “a lot worse” in the 2025-26 school year than in the prior year, according to a nationally representative survey of more than 5,800 teachers conducted by the EdWeek Research Center as part of the project.
“To me, that’s a cry for help on the part of the teachers, that they need more support in being able to interpret … and mitigate student misbehavior,” said Heather Peske, the president of NCTQ.
The new framework builds on NCTQ’s 2020 evaluation of teacher-preparation programs. That review of program requirements and syllabi found most programs taught preservice educators to establish academic rules and routines and arrange physical space for class management. But only about half of programs addressed ways future teachers should respond to serious misbehavior, and only a quarter of programs discussed positive reinforcement.
Understanding ‘nuances’ of student behavior is vital for teachers
Studies have found teachers in their first three years are much more likely than more experienced teachers to send students to the principal’s office for bad behavior, and providing them with better discipline strategies could halve racial gaps in student discipline referrals.
“We know that knowledge and assumptions about students impacts how teachers treat their students,” Peske said, “and in classrooms where students don’t feel like teachers take the time to understand them and their culture, that affects their behavior.”
Teacher Demetrius Dove said his preservice training in classroom management covered mainly “surface-level” strategies, such as keeping physically close to a misbehaving student.
Now in his first year teaching English/language arts to 6th and 7th graders at the Atlanta SMART Academy charter school, Dove said he struggled at first to understand why his students acted out.
“I may be reading this [behavior] as, ‘oh, they’re just disinterested in my curriculum,’ but no, they’re actually responding out of their trauma. That’s why they don’t want to read that book,” Dove said. “I didn’t necessarily get taught to notice the nuances.”
The NCTQ framework recommends every teacher preparation program explicitly show educators how to:
- Understand their own and students’ behaviors, emotions, and cultures;
- Establish clear expectations and structure for the classroom; and
- Respond to student behaviors, including reinforcing good behavior and treating misbehavior as “a skill gap rather than a character flaw.”
It’s critical for aspiring teachers to understand the most common reasons students misbehave, such as frustration, attention-seeking, and hunger, and adjust their responses , Peske said. “The teacher really needs to dig underneath the inappropriate behavior and consider the contributors in order to get at the root and really change the behavior,” she said.
The framework also calls for preparation programs to give future teachers more opportunities to practice specific intervention strategies for different groups of students.
Estefani Robles, for example, learned and practiced classroom management in her teacher residency in theFresno Unified school district, located in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Yet she still quailed a bit taking on a self-contained class of 14 students with disabilities this year. She had never been in a self-contained special education classroom for students with mild to moderate disabilities.
“Even though I experienced all these things in student-teaching, I noticed, coming into my setting, that I had never seen it done,” Robles said.
She has spent this year working with her district coach to test different strategies and classroom structures to improve her students’ social skills. While working through an assignment in Second Step, a social-emotional- development curriculum, Robles listened to her students explain what help they’d want if they fell out of a chair.
While most students wanted a hand to help them get up, one boy said he wanted no help. “I really took that moment to be like, OK, sometimes people really don’t need that physical help; maybe they just want space,” she said.
Practicing intervention strategies for students with disabilities in particular, and getting to understand her students better has helped her improve their behavior in class, Robles said.
“They know it’s OK to feel whatever it is that they’re feeling, but they also know that there are expectations once they are back and regulated,” Robles said. “Building trust and being firm but kind has been really important with them.”
