A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

participate in the lesson; then these signs of success are 
something you may like to remember and look for in future 
lessons. These are the kind of signs that we hope you will be 
seeing again as an outcome of Exploratory Action Research 
– after all, its main purpose is to help you and your students 
achieve greater success in the classroom. 
1.2 A challenging teaching situation
We have shared with you an example of a successful 
experience and asked you to share your own. We will
now turn to less positive experiences, which can also
be effective to trigger reflection about your practice. 
We will share with you a challenging teaching and learning 
situation from Camila Villalobos, a Chilean teacher, as an 
example for the second task. Camila teaches at a school
in Chiloé Island in the south of Chile and she teaches pupils 
aged 10 to 13. 
“There are 28 students in each level approximately and
in each grade I have a group of five or six students that 
come from P.I.E. (Programme for Inclusion in Education) 
and in each of my lessons these students did not 
participate and they were not motivated in comparison 
with the rest of the class. For me as a teacher, all my 
students are important and I needed to help them all to 
develop the same competences in English. The majority
of P.I.E. students come from the countryside and other 
islands near to Chiloe Island; many of them never had 
English as a subject and those who had English did not 
achieve the competences of their corresponding grade. 
Most of these students live with foster families as well
as in the town boarding school during the week and travel 
to their houses on the weekends to see their families. I had 
tried different strategies such as to let them sit with their 
friends to feel more comfortable, I changed my tone
of voice and my body language with them and even 
encouraged them to ask questions in class by 
personalising the lessons more, but nothing seemed
to work.”
I saw
I heard
I felt

---