CLASSROOM CONTROL ISSUES

When I started my teaching practice I didn’t know how hard it was going to be, I was observing them during two weeks but I did not feel prepared to face their wrong behaviors. On one simple sight I realized the “conflictive students”, and I was really afraid of them. Of course I have experienced some of the shown situations in the picture, several times there were students doing something else or talking to another classmate and as a consequence I had to stop the class just for telling them they were wasting their learning classmates’ time and at the same time they were interrupting my class. Despite of the fact that they are young people, they are between sixteen and eighteen years old, about 8 students were always making noise, screaming or laughing loudly behaving like children, I told them it every time I saw these kinds of conducts and they seemed to feel very embarrassing, so that was one of my first ideas to face these kinds of situations, it sounds so simple but it did work. I clearly remember one awful day to me; that day I had to deal with the worst and the most difficult situation in my teaching practice. Every student knows that Tuesdays we work with the student book adding complementary activities, but a considerable number of students did not bring their books. My guide teacher suggested me writing “anotaciones” for all these students, I had to know who had the books and who hadn’t. A boy did not want to tell me his name, he was really angry with me because the note in his student life sheet (hoja de vida) was going to be the first negative one. He started to scream me that it was unfair, I did not how to react because his voice was getting a little bit aggressive, but I explained him that they knew we worked with the English books. He stayed after the class had finished because he wanted to know what I was going to write, he still was reclaiming with angry and I asked him getting quiet. I decided to talk with him, I wanted to hear him because his reaction was uncommon, his behavior, at least in English class was going pretty well. We had agreeable conversation and he told me some problems he had, so I took it in count. We finished in good terms. Since that day I focused on try to get information from the students’ speech, I paid attention on those problematic ones and I called every one, one by one, after each class to have a conversation with them. I proposed them goals and I tried to motivate these aims with extra marks or positive notes (anotaciones positivas). I succeed the most of the time and I think this is a huge idea to attach those students who are always interrupting the classes, as a teacher you have to have a close relation as you can through a dialogue every time you can do it overall with the students you notice are having problems or you see they are behaving unusually they perform.