Uncovering Myself to Understand You

• Main Authors: Sayra Milena Lozano Carvajal, Santiago Velásquez Tangarife
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas 2017-02-01
• Series: Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal
• Subjects: Professional development; reflective teachers; collaborative work; classroom management
• Online Access: http://revistas.udistrital.edu.co/ojs/index.php/calj/article/view/9892

Classroom incidents in which teachers have to exhibit their expertise at managing a class is a commonplace in teachers´ daily routines; though sometimes some of those classroom incidents turn into critical moments. However, ordinary disruptive classroom situations are not as catastrophic as when teachers themselves provoke them. On top of this, when some teachers have to face any sort of classroom disruption, most of them are unable to come up with any immediate and effective solution. In this paper, we will describe how we combined both, the critical incident technique and the cooperative development theory, so as to reflect upon a critical moment of each of us, and be able to improve our viewpoints regarding the potential solutions that can emerge to cope with those critical moments in our own classrooms. The findings show that we strengthened our professional ties, we invigorated our teaching skills and developed from our own insights into new perspectives in relation to how to better tackle classroom management difficulties. Finally, in the conclusions we share how profound were the changes which, by the way, were not only in the pedagogical sense.