Having a fun classroom and teaching a fun lesson isn't enough to stop behaviour problems, and it isn't going to miraculously transform your challenging students into hard-working, diligent stars. Without knowledge, understanding and application of other key teaching and classroom management skills a FUN lesson with challenging students may well turn into a free-for-all and only serve to build you a reputation as a walk-over.

Teaching is not about 'entertaining' students or letting them just 'mess about' and it certainly isn't about demoting them to the role of passive spectators. With time, even the most colourful and humorous show becomes boring and even annoying to pupils if they are repeatedly expected to merely 'be entertained' or just 'have a laugh'.

If challenging students are to feel truly involved in a lesson they need to be given opportunities to develop, grow, improve and feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement. They can still have fun but it is more productive if the fun comes from interacting with each other, finding out, working out, building, trying, experimenting, practicing and doing. They don't get these things from just sitting back and watching or messing around.

I like to use the simple analogy of your pupils each carrying an 'emotion rucksack' on their backs as they enter your lessons. If they arrive with the feeling that the lesson (based on their previous experience) is something they will have to ENDURE for the next hour -- something that is boring, irrelevant to their lives or perhaps embarrassing or difficult - their rucksack will be filled with NEGATIVE emotions before they even set foot through the door.

Teaching pupils who have preconceived negativity towards your lessons is the HARD way to teach. It's very difficult getting students to engage when they have already made up their minds that the lesson isn't something they're going to enjoy or get any benefit from.

The easy way is to have them actually LOOKING FORWARD to a lesson carrying a rucksack with a little bit of INTRIGUE, perhaps recollections of a few LAUGHS they had last lesson or a feeling of SUCCESS and ACHIEVEMENT having UNDERSTOOD a difficult concept for the first time. Isn't that what education is all about?

Can we plan to include genuinely interesting activities which take account of students' strengths and interests, promote participation and collaboration and create a desire to learn and discover? Can we create lessons where all pupils feel valued, connected, involved and have a chance to achieve, succeed and develop new skills? Can we make our lessons interesting as opposed to 'boring'? Can we create a fun classroom and a fun lesson which doesn't just turn into a waste of time?

Yes we can.

Cooperative learning activities, attention grabbing starters, learning games, relevant subject content, ability-appropriate tasks, music, energizers and brain-breaks, novel plenary activities, anecdotes, analogies, role play, humour breaks, exciting demonstrations and truly engaging lesson structures can all be learned and planned into any lesson turning it from a fun lesson to a successful lesson.

Indeed, excellence can be planned into lessons and the following resource will show you exactly how: Needs Focused Lessons. The aim of the Needs-focused Lessons program is to provide any teacher with the tools, resources and activities that will help them plan and deliver not so much a fun lesson as an 'outstanding' lesson.

Rob Plevin is the author of Magic Classroom Management and the originator of the Needs-Focused approach to behavior management for parents and teachers. The Needs-Focused approach presents a step-by-step, easy to follow system for effectively preventing and dealing with behaviour problems.

Rob provides training in schools, universities and youth centres all over the world and full details of his courses and speaking schedule are available at his website... http://www.needsfocusedlessons.com