Reflective writing Nº1: The English classroom

I. Introduction
What do you think the cartoon provided below is illustrating? Why? Answer briefly.

I think the cartoon is showing a class in which there is no order, it seems that they don’t have a Teacher, but
actually they have one. For me they are in a kind of break but inside the classroom and while the teacher is
trying to do her job “teaching”.
This is something I wouldn’t like to live. Actually I passed through something similar last year, fortunately, I
had to leave that school. Thanks God, nowadays I am doing my final practicum at a very good school. This
picture provided above illustrates for me the class that no one wants to have but a class that unfortunately is
very popular in our public schools in Chile with students that don’t pay attention and that don’t want to
participate in the lessons. Maybe because they are not motivated by the teacher, maybe because the teacher
doesn’t know how to motivate her students or maybe she is just not motivated. But whatever the problem is this
kind of classes are the worst.

II. Reflective writing

Taking into account the information you collected during the observation stage, and the team teaching stage:
1. Reflect on the students’ behavior in the English classroom.
2. Have you seen your students behaving this way? Support your answer.
3. Propose ideas to deal with disruptive students in your school.
4. You have one full page (letter format) for this task; be as clear, brief and precise as you can.

During my observation and team teaching stage at David Trumbull School, I remember the teacher doing her
classes and the students participating with her , at least the majority of them. There were always some pupils
that were thinking or doing something different. But I can say that the classes were for me good.
Fortunately, I never saw something like the picture above in the class with my students. Of course they weren’t
all the time quite or not moving, but never screaming, throwing papers, jumping, laughing, etc. They were
paying attention and participating in the lesson. They talked to each other but not in an excessive way, they
were all the time conscious that they had a teacher in front of them trying to teach them. And if for any reason
they forgot that for a minute, the teacher just wrote their names on the board and they were quite again. This
way of keeping them paying attention was very efficient for the teacher the students knew if their names were
wrote on the board they could be punished with an observation on the class book.
I think that that is a good method to maintain the students in order. Another good thing is to give something to
do, like an extra job to the disruptive students because they feel they are important and that are doing something
good. Something that is very effective with my students is to do the lessons not always in the classroom but take
them to the computers lab for working there or for observing a PPT. These techniques are useful at least for
me.