While taking this module, I have been noting down any event which I perceived as a critical incident. The five that I deemed the most noteworthy I have posted on this blog as critical incidents 1-5. However, there were some other incidents that didn’t make the cut that I think are still worth mentioning. Although I’m not planning to go into as much detail as the ones I have already posted, I will continue to number them. So here are my critical incidents 6-9:

Critical incident 6 – Students refusing to work together

This was a cultural issue. In the ESOL Entry 1 class, there was an issue where some of the male Arabic students refused to work with the female Arabic students. This was made all the more interesting because the same male students had no problem working with female students from other countries.

This was something I hadn’t come across before, as when I had taught in the Middle East, as I had taught male-only classes. During the lesson, I decided not to push the issue and let the students work with who they wanted to. However, reflecting on the incident, it did bother me.

After the lesson, I spoke with their teacher (as it was a cover class) and asked if she had experienced this problem and how she handled it. They said that this was a common issue at the beginning of the entry 1 class and that it wasn’t something she really noticed in the higher-level groups and postulated that maybe it was because the students in the Entry 1 class had not lived in the UK for long and therefore were still getting used to the cultural difference here.

It raised an interesting question for me:

‘How much should we impose our cultural norms on students, especially ones which reflect the equality and diversity policies which we adhere to?’

To follow up on this, I discussed the issue with my manager who ardently believed that if the students wanted to study in the college, then they had to respect and follow the principles of diversity and inclusion that the college, and British society, adhered to.

It is an interesting area for discussion. While I believe that equality and diversity is an important and essential part of our society, I also worry about the intercultural conflict that this may cause for learners who have grown up with different views of society.

 

Critical incident 7 –  Institutional needs Vs Educational needs

Last summer, I was employed as the summer school coordinator at the college I work for. My duties included inducting and testing new students, classing students, assigning teachers to classes and ensuring the smooth running of the summer school.

The critical incident happened towards the end of the summer when the student numbers had started to go down. As a result of this, my manager instructed me to reduce the number of adult classes to two. This meant that we had any student who got less than 50% in the placement test in the lower class and those who scored 51% and above in the higher class.

This was an issue for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it meant that the level of the students in the low class ranged from low elementary to intermediate, and in the higher class, they ranged from intermediate to advanced.

While myself and the two teachers understood the economic reasons for this, the strain on the teachers and the failure to adequately provide the learners with what they had expected caused what had otherwise been a very successful summer to end on a bad note.

I list this as a critical incident because it brings up the question of whether or not institutions should focus only on economic factors. If we had kept the other levels open then we would have ended up with some classes with only a few students, and of course, after paying the teachers, the profit would have been reduced, or even a loss may have been incurred. However, in a competitive industry, failing to meet student expectations could lead to less returning students and poor feedback.

I followed this up by discussing this with my manager after the summer had finished, and he agreed it was a problem that needed looking at. In the end, we decided that we would not run lessons in the last week of August and any students enrolled long term would be offered a break and then could join the ESOL classes when term started. At the time, it seemed like a fair compromise, and we will see how it turns out next summer. It has left me wondering whether financial factors are more important than educational needs and whether the two can really co-exist.

 

Critical incident 8 – When learner expectations don’t match my teaching beliefs

An incident which actually surprised me in class was when a student refused to participate in pair or group work because they believed that there was no value in conversing with other students and that it was only through speaking with the teacher that they would improve.

I had experienced this before but had always been able to explain the benefits of student interaction, and the issue was quickly resolved. However, this particular student refused to accept my explanation and was adamant that the only time she wanted to speak was directly with me.

I view this as a critical incident because I was unable to persuade the student and not wanting to derail my whole lesson, I bent to her will, and while the rest of the class chatted in pairs or groups, I sat with this student and did the pair work with her.

To try and solve this problem, I spoke privately with the student after class, and she very reluctantly agreed to participate in group and pair work and interact with the other learners.

I have mentioned this to several colleagues, and they all agreed that this was a learner expectation that couldn’t be catered for. Still, it did make me wonder whether the style of teaching that we employ does cause anxiety for our learners on a wider scale and whether I should be more flexible when I encounter it.

 

Critical incident 9 – Lessons derailed by current events

I have discussed the sudden transition to online teaching in my fourth critical incidents post. However, before the closure of the college and the move to online classes, the Coronavirus pandemic had already begun to affect classes.

A class which usually had eleven students became a class of three. Two international students had returned to their countries. One student was self-isolating because he had recently returned from Italy, and the rest were either self-isolating because of medical conditions or were too scared to come in.

I had planned to teach a lesson on active and passive forms and already had the lesson ‘menu’ on the smartboard as the students arrived. However, after a minute or so, I realised that they were not engaged at all and when I asked what was wrong, they told me that they wanted to talk about the coronavirus.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t even sure if I was allowed to talk about the pandemic with my students, so I immediately felt like I was being put in an awkward position. Ultimately I made a judgement call and decided to speak about it with them. In fact, what they actually wanted to talk about was if the college was going to close and if it did how would that affect their studies. I’ve reconciled that it was ok to talk about that, but what the critical incident was for me was:

• Should I abandon my lesson plan to discuss issues that learners want to discuss?
• And if I do, how do I decide which issues are valid enough to abandon my lesson plan?

These are still questions that I don’t know the answer to. Maybe it is just a matter of making a judgement call at the time.