Scenario 5

It was during the last week of my practicum class and I had observed a student throwing a chair in the cafeteria as well as many other teachers that had seen this. I wasn’t sure that if I should approach the student or let a teacher take care of it. I looked up and saw a teacher walking towards the student. Before the teacher got to the student, the lunch bell rang and he headed for the door and left the cafeteria. I then saw the teacher go after the student.

I started to walk back to my classroom and when I got to the top of the stairs, I saw the student and the teacher talking. The teacher told the student that he needed to go see the principal and that she would go with him. He was outraged and started to swear at the teacher. At this point I started to walk over to them because the teacher was a little lady. He then took off down the stairs before I made it to them. I asked her if she needed help and she said she was fine. I then watched them go to the principal’'s office. In this situation what do you do as a practicum student?

Question from Dr. Theresa . . . In this situation, what do you do as a teacher if you were in the exact same situation?

Scenario 4

You are teaching one of your classes, when all of a sudden, an outraged Mother comes through the door and knocks down everything in her way. The parent's child and you have had a difficult time lately, due to disciplinary problems in the classroom. You have tried to set up meetings with the parents, but they refuse to come in, they just claim that the child is not at fault. You have just given the student another detention that day, and they had to call home. The mother is sick of you giving her child detention. She is yelling everything in the book at you and threatening to hurt you. It seems there is no way to calm her down, and there is a possibility that any move might make her go into attack mode which would threaten the students. What do I do?

Scenario 3

If you are in front of the entire class trying to correct a pretest so that everyone knows what to do for the test, what do you do if you have one student who is just yelling out all of the answers, sometimes before you even ask the question and the rest of the class is sitting there bored out of their minds. You don't want to ask the student not to answer because he is the type of student who if you did that he would probably find some other way to be disruptive and then he wouldn't be paying attention at all. Plus, chances are that if he were not yelling out the answers, no one else would have.

Scenario 2

I was walking in the hallway while classes were changing. I happened to glance to my left and two students who were a couple feet away were all over each other. I have zero experience on how to handle this type of situation and I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of students, so I chose to ignore the situation. Other students were around these students and the moment was awkward. The students did notice my presence, however they didn't know who I was; just that I had noticed them and probably looked as if I was irked.

Scenario 1

I encountered a student during my time in the classroom who is constantly trying to get my attention and the attention of the teacher. I know that he could be a very good student but he does not use his time wisely and is sometimes disruptive when the other students are working. I think that he needs constant attention and, unfortunately, finds a negative way to do it most times. He also feels that he needs to be the class comedian. I tried not addressing his antics in the hopes that he would stop but it has continued for the entire three weeks. Most times when he is acting up a lot, the teacher is outside of the classroom but he will still be mildly disruptive even when she and I are both there. After asking him to quiet or settle down once or twice in a class he is usually pretty good. It would be my goal for him to be able to come into class and get to work without the usual 5 or 10 minutes of his antsy stand up comedy routine. Is there a good way to achieve this goal?