Having a great youth group management approach can be challenging. Student behavior can vary from day to day because of a wide range of factors, one of them being, THEY ARE TEENAGERS!
Youth Leaders everywhere need an effective Youth Group management strategy.
So what should be part of your classroom management plan in your attempt to improve student behavior? Well an effective classroom management plan has many elements, but there are three things that every youth leader can do starting tomorrow to ensure better student behavior.
Be Happy with Your Youth Group
It is easy to get angry or upset with a group of teenagers if they are not listening to you or fooling around. If you become angry or upset during a class, that can be like lighting a match stick on a pool of gasoline, you will just feed that fire until it blows up! And well…that isn’t good for youth group management.
What takes place in these cases is that you enter directly into a vicious circle, the angrier you get, and the more your students will push. Remove yourself from that situation by never entering it. Even if a particular student won’t stop pushing your buttons, remember why you became a youth leader. Wear a smile on your face, and never react with anger to your students.
Compliment, Commend and Cheer
Praise your youth group whenever possible. Your students need to know how you want them to conduct themselves, and the use of compliments is a fantastic approach to do this. Maybe you have a few members of your youth ministry who are a little “rambunctious”. When they are acting calm and participating in class praise them with a few words of encouragement after class “Thanks for your great participation today!”. This is incredibly difficult to do if a student has made class tough for you for the past few weeks, but if you try this you will become aware of progress in their conduct.
Use their Vocabulary
No don’t talk like them, “OMG, Whateva! phhh” ( alright alright, not every teen talks like this, that was unfair, but you get the idea) Use words that a teen knows and understands. Don’t use words during a Bible lesson that they wouldn’t understand unless you are prepared to explain the meaning of the word. There is nobody in your Youth group that needs to be impressed by your command of the language. Big words usually lead to deaf ears, in most cases if a student doesn’t understand something, they will just tune you out. From teaching, to interacting with your group, keep it simple.
