April 7th, 2019

         We have a student with social problems due to substance abuse. (…) This student (…) would overstep the limits challenging the teachers (using the phone in class, having a speaker and putting loud music, answering aggressively, eating in class, skipping class and going into other classrooms, he wouldn’t remove his hat nor his jacket, confronting anybody who said anything that he didn’t like, etc.). We, as teachers, realized that we had to adopt other strategies to get closer to him. One of this strategies came as a group necessity to understand and help him as peers, since our actions hadn’t had much effect.

He gives a lot of importance to his peers and he needs to feel respected by them, no matter what. Based on this, we decided to do a dynamic to deal with good coexistence from the difficulties, and how we can help.

First we let the students ask any questions they had because we saw they had asked a lot of things. We did it out loud in a session while being in a circle.

From here, we told them that we would be doing a dynamic to work with good coexistence in the classroom. (…)

We had to make awareness so we can improve and work as a team, at least for this course. We weren’t asking them to be friends, but we were asking for a good working atmosphere. 

The dynamic went like this:

Sitting in a circle, each one had a piece of paper and a pen. In the first part, each student had to answer anonymously the following questions:

1. Describe yourself with a positive adjective.
2. Think of a behavior that creates a good atmosphere in class.
3. Think of a behavior that doesn’t create a good atmosphere in class.

4. Why do you think it is important to have a good atmosphere in class?
5. And what can we do?
6. How can we act?

(…) After that dynamic, and as the days went by, we noticed an improvement in behaviour and attitudes inside the classroom, not necessarily with this student in particular, but in general, since the dynamic was addressed for a good atmosphere with all.

Regarding this student and his behavior such as using his phone or playing on his computer during class, talking when he’s not supposed to or bothering others, we noticed that the other students would say things like: “Hey, put the phone away or they’ll catch you”, “if they catch you playing on your computer, they’ll

take it away”, “hey, stop that, I can’t hear”, “that’s not appropriate”, “hey, don’t get nervous or you’ll mess it up”, “relax, It’s just one more hour until the break”, etc.

We use these strategies so we can work on the basis of a team of equals, but we have to be careful that they don’t get too many responsibilities. We ask them for collaboration, so that together we can make things work.

Basically, we want to work on group cohesion. As adults, we have to make sure that we don’t overwhelm our students, we are responsible for classroom management and what happens with our students. However, the thing is that we want them to be aware of the influence they have over their peers.

(…) For a group of people to work together it’s necessary for them to know each other, but especially to understand each other. We don’t want everybody to become friends, we don’t ask them that because it’s impossible and that’s not our goal, but we do want them to understand that they are sharing a time and space, and in that time and space everybody has the right to feel comfortable. Because when we feel comfortable somewhere, everything gets much better. It’s about working cohesion from a wider perspective. For me, it’s very necessary that we explain things to students with examples of what they live and what we can show. That way we work empathy, and they are quick to relate concepts and making associations. If we don’t talk about these things, they tend to misinterpret things, and then it’s much

more easier to bother someone whose difficulties are evident, than trying to understand what happens to that person and what can I do to work well together if I have to work with them. Normally, they are left with what they see, and it’s hard to understand that everybody is different and that we work differently because of our personalities or lifestyle.

The sooner we start working, the more work we will have done in the future of these young people. It’s true that we find a lot of barriers such as assertiveness and respect concepts, everybody knows what they mean and how to apply them, but not all of them do it in the same way or circumstances, it depends with who they do or don’t do it.

Illustration pg.4: Valentí Mambrilla