Coping with Seven Disruptive Personality Types in the Classroom

kThe Explosive StudentCharacteristicsThe student with an explosive personality style is easy to recognize in the classroom. That isbecause the explosive student is inclined to be volatile in ways that draw everyone’sattention. Explosive students will shout, use profanity with abandon, engage in bullyingbehavior, and sometimes make veiled or explicit verbal or physical threats. Explosive collegestudents have also been known to pick fights and interrupt lectures with loud and abusiveremarks. Sometimes they will use office meetings with instructors to intimidate and harassthem.For a wide range of reasons, some explosive students display explosive behavior onlyintermittently and rather harmlessly. Others, however, may be on a rampage from the daythey arrive on campus, and their explosive behavior may get out of control repeatedly.Therefore, these students are apt to pose a persistent threat to other students and to theirinstructors.It can be a big shock to a professor to experience this sort of outburst in the classroom. It isnot the sort of thing one ordinarily expects to experience while teaching, and therefore it canbe very difficult and confusing to know what to do, especially if there have been no warningsigns of impending trouble before the offending outburst.How to Respond• Safety firstWhen instructors are faced with a student who is severely out of control with rage, either inan office or in a classroom, their first concern should be the safety of their students andthemselves.Consider the frightening situation of a student who, in a rage, threatened to kill. When thispossible scenario was posed, one instructor stated that she would most likely respond byescorting the student to the campus psychological service.Unfortunately, this is not a good idea. The reasons for not carrying out such a measureshould be fairly obvious. The student may in fact be an imminent threat to others and shouldtherefore not be chaperoned anywhere by a defenseless instructor.7