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Growing With Proficiency The Podcast
Welcome to Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast! Are you a World Language teacher who is looking for ideas, strategies, activities, and inspiration to create a World Language class where you and your students enjoy using the language to learn about the world and each other? Do you want to transform your class into an acquisition-driven instruction space where you intentionally provide a ton of comprehensible input?
If you are, you're in the right place.
Let's start this journey together. Head over to IG, and send me a DM @claudiamelliott to let me know what topics you would like me to cover in an upcoming episode.Join my free Facebook community, Growing With C. Also, check out my blog to start discovering some of these ideas and strategies at growingwithproficiency.com
Growing With Proficiency The Podcast
Episode 208: When a Student Says “I Hate This Class”: A Framework for Responding Without Reacting
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A student threw her backpack on the floor and said loudly, “I hate this class. I hate everything about this class.” More than once.
Everything inside of me wanted to react. I wanted to defend myself, my class, and all the work I put into creating a space where students feel successful.
But I didn’t.
In this episode, I’m taking you inside what happened next, the framework that helped me respond without escalating the situation, and the private conversation that followed. We’ll talk about what we can do when a student’s frustration becomes disruptive: regulate ourselves first, have the conversation privately, set the boundary, give students better options for communicating what they feel, and then release.
But this experience also revealed a blind spot I didn’t expect.
I care deeply about my students feeling connected, confident, and successful in my classroom. But somewhere along the way, I had started watching this student a little too closely—hoping she would smile, laugh, participate differently, and eventually love the class.
And that made me ask myself a much harder question:
Do our students need to enjoy our class in order to belong in it?
This episode is about classroom management, yes. But it’s also about us—our triggers, our expectations, and what difficult moments with students can teach us about ourselves when we’re willing to look.
Grab your cafecito ☕️, your mate, or just take me with you on your drive to school. This is a conversation I think we need to have.
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Profe de español,
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