 Hi this is Jennifer Gonzalez for Cult of Pedagogy. I am going to share with you today a strategy called Distract the Distractor. This is a way of dealing with off-task behavior in your students. It is appropriate for high school, middle school, elementary school, college teaching, corporate training. If you're working with a group of people and you need them to stay on task with something, this is a way of dealing with the off-task behavior quickly in a way that saves time, doesn't distract the rest of the class and avoids lots of larger discipline issues. So here's what it is. Let's look at an example. Suppose you are a math teacher and you are going over the homework problems from last night. You're going through them one at a time and you've got one student in the back of the class who is whispering to the girl next to her. So there's a high tension way of dealing with this by calling her out in front of everybody and saying Jane, stop talking. If Jane is the kind of kid who responds with hostility to something like this, then she might talk back and say I wasn't talking and why are you always picking on me and it can escalate and escalate into a big power struggle where you write her an office referral and she gets in trouble for defiance and it can turn into a whole big thing. So that's something you want to avoid. You could redirect her and just say Jane, let's get refocused. She could react the same way. Some teachers respond to things like this with silence and that's very effective actually to just stop what you're doing and the silence generally gets everybody's attention and makes those who are doing something they're not supposed to do realize oh she notices I better stop. So silence is helpful. It's really good but the only disadvantage to it is that it can pull everybody else's attention away from the work also. You've got a good flow going with everybody else except for one or two kids and to stop that prickling sensation of something is wrong that comes over everybody. Everybody's wondering what did I do and they start looking around to see who's causing the problem and so it can slow down a really nice flow that you have with everybody else. So with distract the distractor you save even more time and you've got no tension. So here's what distract the distractor is. You've got Jane talking to her friend. You simply ask her a content based question to get her back into the lesson. So you could just say to her Jane what did you get for number five and that pulls her attention away from the talking. All the attention is on her but it isn't the kind of attention that says ooh you were talking you're in trouble. It's just you're acting as if she was engaged the whole time. This preserves her dignity. It preserves your relationship with her. It keeps the flow of the class going and it avoids all the big power struggles that come with some of the other approaches. Here's a big key though. The question you ask must be something that you know she can answer. So it should be something pretty easy. If you're not sure if she got number five or if you're thinking number five her answer might be wrong then have her just read number five. Say Jane can you just tell it you know go ahead and read it so we're all you know looking at the same problem. Just any kind of a content based task for question that you know she can do because we're not trying to embarrass that again it leads to the problem or the power struggles. I should note before I go that this term distract the distractor. I've been using the technique for years but I just found it online the other day and I thought it was really catchy and it comes from a book called Opportunities and Options in Classroom Management. The authors are Patricia Kyle and Lawrence Rojien and I will put a link to that book below this video. So the next time you have a student who is day dreaming or talking or fooling around or texting instead of using an approach that you've tried already consider trying to distract the distractor instead and see how it goes. Good luck. Thanks for watching. Have a great day. Hey don't go yet. We have got a ton of other great videos to watch. There are videos on instructional strategies on classroom management and lots of other videos for teachers so subscribe to the channel and you will be notified every time we put up a new video. Once you're done watching videos come on over to our website at www.cultipedagogy.com and you are going to find a ton of other stuff that you're going to love. Thanks so much for visiting and watching and have a great day.