This document is a reflective report from a trainee teacher, Belen de la Cruz, about a lesson they observed. The lesson was on using a short story to discuss bullying. The story provided context for language learning and helped develop students' literacy, thinking, and intercultural skills. Students were engaged in sharing their experiences with bullying. For future lessons, Belen suggests improving the classroom arrangement, such as sitting in a circle, and including more activities like summarizing, retelling, and acting out parts of the story.

1. REFLECTIVE REPORT TRAINEE BELEN DE LA CRUZ
OBSERVATION REPORT:
LESSON PLAN Nº 9
Trainee: Belén de la Cruz
School: School 180
Course: 6th forms C and D
Mentor teacher: Joana Herrán
Textbooks: not today
Date: Monday, October 9th,2018.
Topic: The Magic Bag Project
Teacher Educator: Estela N. Braun
Stories provide a motivating, meaningful context for language learning
since children are naturally drawn to stories. Using literature with YLE at school
is a very helpful resource to use in our language classes since it contributes to
develop literacy, thinking skills, emotional growth, positive interpersonal attitudes,
and intercultural competence.
Stories define who we are. Our sense of identity is forged by the stories
we tell ourselves, the ones we come to believe in and those we choose to dismiss.
And most importantly, they build and preserve a group’s sense of community.
The fact that literary texts allow students to develop empathy for the literary world
helps them to put themselves in the position of others and see the world from
different perspectives. It is the role of the teacher to take advantage of that
material and develop a series of activities that help learners make the best of that
reading experience.

2. I always enjoyed sharing literary pieces with children because it develops
their imagination and in this case, I selected this story because it deals with an
important issue at school as it is bullying. Taking into account pupils’ preferences,
age, cognitive developmental stages and context, with the help of my educator
teacher I could implement the short story into an amazing debate class. I liked to
listen how engaged were students with the topic and their freedom to share their
own experiences with the class.
I would like to improve the classroom’s arrangement, maybe we could
have shared this experience in the music classroom but it was not available. In
this way, we could sit in a circle to listen to the audio – which I should stop to
explain so students could understand better the story. Also, we could write down
main ideas so we can make a summary of it and then it will be easy for them to
retell the story.
I have already taken a test to close the didactic sequence and I did not
include the short story, but I would like to assess it in a short activity in which they
have to identify the pictures and the situations according to the short story and
then in groups they can retell the stories using the pictures. Or they can perform
parts of the story and after that they can explain what they should or should not
do.