I can remember being in 5th grade and having a couple of students that would disrupt class by just being

rude or a being a wise guy/gal. The teacher would ignore it for the most part unless it was getting way

out of hand. Those particular two students would feed of the discipline measures if the teacher would

have to get them in trouble. If would go from some giggling and laughing in the back of the room to

throwing things across the room and refusing to sit down as soon as she would try to get on to them so

at a certain point when we came into class one morning the desks were arranged in clusters of 4 and in

5 different clusters. Each of those two students were paired with a group of students that were very well

behaved and would not feed off their behavior. She made sure to separate them at opposite ends of the

classroom as well. Looking back, I can see that she was using the zone proximity learning. It was very

successful. It didn’t fix everything but for the most part I remember the class going a lot more smoothly

after that. One of the kids even received an award at the end of the year for being so improved and he

actually made the basketball team the following year and went on to become a good person. The other

not so much I’m not sure he finished school, but I suspect that he had a lot of negative things going on in

his life that was working against him. Still the methods she used to handle these two kids are

appropriate. It allowed for her to reign things in and not make it look like she was singling them out or

punishing them because when we came in she just said, “we are going to try something different for

awhile that I think will be fun and you guys will enjoy it.” She even had a couple games that would have

to be played by using the groups, so it was almost like reverse psychology because none 0f us had any

idea there was an ulterior motive to the rearrangement.