A recent critical incident that could have had a negative impact on my students learning was when a teacher walked out of school in the middle of a lesson. We both had an upper intermediate class but were at different points in the book. One particular morning I tried to play my class CD but there was a glitch and the track I needed wouldn’t play. The track in question was the beginning of a two page spread of listening exercises that followed the previous day’s lesson and would lead into the next day’s.
The bell for the start of the class had already gone but only five minutes previously. I decided that the best course of action would be to ask the other teacher in question if she could lend me her CD. I walked into the classroom and discovered that the teacher was very upset about something, she was standing in front of the students crying. I asked her if she was OK and if she could continue with the lesson. The teacher said she felt unable to continue and that she must leave the school and go home. I said OK but was slightly concerned, not only for her but also for my students and her students as neither had a teacher.
I quickly visited the office, which was next to my classroom, I couldn’t find the principle or director of studies. I did however manage to track them down in the school quite quickly without too much trouble. The two upper intermediate classes were swiftly combined and we continued in the course book with a lesson that neither class had completed. The students were extremely understanding and as many of them knew each other from around the school they gelled automatically. If they started to chatter about the morning’s incidents I tried to bring them back to the work at hand as I would have done if they had been gossiping about any other subject unrelated to their English lesson.
The bell for the start of the class had already gone but only five minutes previously.