5. Rehearse Replies
Rehearsing how you will reply to a defiant student is going to be difficult but effective. Watch some videos of kids going crazy and practice what your reply may be. This will help you start to create a plan for how you will handle situations that you weren’t ready for originally. For the most part, this is going to take a significant amount of practice and the best way to learn is from successes and failures in the real world.
As long as you are trying to help the child, you are likely not making anything worse, just try to use empathy as much as possible to ensure that you understand why they are upset. Then turn that into a discussion about how that can be prevented going forward.