participate in the lesson; then these signs of success are
something you may like to remember and look for in future
lessons. These are the kind of signs that we hope you will be
seeing again as an outcome of Exploratory Action Research
– after all, its main purpose is to help you and your students
achieve greater success in the classroom.
1.2 A challenging teaching situation We have shared with you an example of a successful
experience and asked you to share your own. We will
now turn to less positive experiences, which can also
be effective to trigger reflection about your practice.
We will share with you a challenging teaching and learning
situation from Camila Villalobos, a Chilean teacher, as an
example for the second task. Camila teaches at a school
in Chiloé Island in the south of Chile and she teaches pupils
aged 10 to 13.
“There are 28 students in each level approximately and in each grade I have a group of five or six students that come from P.I.E. (Programme for Inclusion in Education) and in each of my lessons these students did not participate and they were not motivated in comparison with the rest of the class. For me as a teacher, all my students are important and I needed to help them all to develop the same competences in English. The majority of P.I.E. students come from the countryside and other islands near to Chiloe Island; many of them never had English as a subject and those who had English did not achieve the competences of their corresponding grade. Most of these students live with foster families as well as in the town boarding school during the week and travel to their houses on the weekends to see their families. I had tried different strategies such as to let them sit with their friends to feel more comfortable, I changed my tone of voice and my body language with them and even encouraged them to ask questions in class by personalising the lessons more, but nothing seemed to work.” I saw
I heard
I felt
