Once your students have been in the same class for a while, they will begin to feel more comfortable with their surroundings. As they make friends and become brave, they will act out more in class.

One of the easiest ways to counter this problem is to restructure student seating arrangements. This will restore your authority over the students.

Rearranging seats will also allow you to manually separate students who begin to work together with the common goal of undermining your authority. You can usually tell when students start to act unruly; in these situations, you must take action quickly to dispel this type of behavior.

However, the middle of a lesson is definitely not the optimal time to regroup your students. Instead, have the new seating arrangement ready when they enter the classroom for the first time on a new day.

You may want to try to clear a seat at the front of the class, near the blackboard if possible. You can use this desk to store teaching material and it will also allow you to continue your lessons without having to go back to your own desk again and again.

Leaving this spot open also gives you a good place to put misbehaving students in class. Clean up the desk and you’ll always have a perfect spot right at the front of the class for troublemakers.

In the event that one of your students seriously violates your rules so that they need to be moved to a different spot right away, ask them to gather their things and move to the empty spot in the front row.

Being called that is humiliating to the student and will usually correct their behavior. It also conveniently places the student right at the front of the class, where any further misbehavior will be easily spotted.