Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Fishead soup]

The purpose of open lessons is to keep government officials in the dark about what really happens in the classroom. I've been to at least a dozen of these so called team teaching lessons where the teachers actually admitted that they never team tought the regular classes. If they don't co-teach regularly then why make a co-teaching demo-lesson? Wouldn't it be useful for Joe newbie to see what he/she could possibly do if his/her co-teacher abandoned him/her to 40 screaming kids. That's because open lessons are not ment to be informative. They're ment to be deceptive.
Schools are only interested in the state of the equipment during the open lesson. They always have the open lesson in a room that's otherwise never used. That's because it might be the only room where the monitor is actually working.

[Ramen]

[lohengrin]

not quite true

our open lesson was in the classroom we always use, using the standard projector screen setup run off my laptop as usual

[akiakiaki]

same for my school as well. Our English classroom is fairly new and everything works.
I'm pretty sure the purpose of open class is to get critiques on your teaching style and to show off your school. I'm just not crazy about the fact I have them two weeks in a row.

[crusher_of_heads]

[buymybook]

I've got 5 co-teachers and one is worthless. This person sits in the back room and almost always has something to say about how the class could have been better. Okay, that's fine. I'm not perfect but who the F*** is this WAD when 'IT' sits in the back room? It told me to explain to my students more about Halloween, I told 'it' I did. 'It' said, "Really?" I said "Yeah."

I have an observation class coming up and I don't know what I'll do? I'm sure I'll get some negative feedback but I don't really care as long as they don't come more than once a year. I may try to make it not so good just so that they don't want to return regularly.

[yeremy]

Where I worked last year, open classes were, supposedly, part of the evaluation process for whether my former school wanted to resign me or not. I never bought into the idea that they're just a 'dog and pony' show. I took them serious because I was on public display and I cared about how I looked.

I also used them as an opportunity to conceive, prepare and do a class on a theme I really wanted to do. I used to work on an open class for a month or longer in order to feel satisfied.

Afterwards, we always had a large meeting, where in my first year at my former job, we used to give "constructive" criticism on the classes we saw. The criticism was generally average at best in terms of helping you become a better teacher and I think that was partly due to the fact that an open class is not a typical class.

My second and third years, the other foreign teachers in my GEPIK city, which ran it's own GEPIK program, figured out that they could go home early if they disregarded asking questions and critiquing other's open classes, so that's what happened. I stopped going to the open classes as much as possible, even though the MOE's in my area issued an edict that all NET's had to go to the open classes in a certain early winter month because many people had quietly stopped going. Nothing ever happened and I was able to work in peace on my own lesson prep for the classes I co-taught at my school.

One piece of advice I would like to give is to think out of the box when preparing for an open class. In one of my last open classes at my former school, my co-teacher and I did a cooking class with a sixth grade class for a group of visiting Chinese teachers from my school's sister elementary school in China. It went over very well. I was (pleasantly) surprised when the visiting Chinese teachers and their political handlers started smiling and got up and joined the sixth graders in making the assigned fruit salad. This was the best and most enjoyable open class to do at my former school.

Today I'm teaching at two Gyoungbuk high schools and my open class this year was when I was "suddenly" videotaped for 15 or 20 minutes on 20 minutes notice to be broadcasted for a large English event at my base high school. I was glad that I was not at my base school that day but at my other school. I'm sure that it would have been a wonderful day as there were 20 open classes that, which I heard the older teachers were all worried about. To tell you the truth, I miss the open classes I had to do at my former school.

[nomad-ish]

while i hate the fakeness of it and being watched by so many other teachers, it's the only time my "co-teachers" will get off their asses and actually co-teach with me. plus they'll be so concerned with making props and extras (to never be used again), that they won't find time to bug me about things in the office.

[smwood]

One of the schools I teach in had open classes every week for two months. We had been given a 2-year 'experimental' status and other schools wanted to see how co-teaching is done (I guess).

One such open class I was criticized because, and I quote verbatim, "the students are learning too much." I asked what the person meant by this, and she explained that the students seemed to know too much and that was taken as a bad thing.

After that I stopped worrying about the criticism and just got on with teaching.

[Misera]

All schools have different types of teachers.. I have to say my coteacher is an incredibly hard worker We had an open class one month after I arrived so she made it 70% her teaching, 30% me teaching. It was more like 90% her teaching because my part consisted more of lil review/repeat games. She says next semester, it'll be 70% me and 30% whoever the new Korean English teacher is though. But the class had a billion teachers come to watch us teach.. and then the meeting afterwords lasted maybe one hour and a half with teachers telling us what we did well on (where the students responded well) and what we could improve on. One teacher also did a presentation on different games in order to share ideas. So for all the Korean English teachers there, it was very useful. For me, not so much since I don't speak a word of Korean .

I dunno how open classes work in other schools but ours was held after most classes had ended (Open class began at 2pm). The meeting lasted until 4:30pm and had a bunch of supervisors and people from the education office and whatever other important people that needed to be there was there. Of course some of the speeches were purely for making the school look a lot more professional than it was and we only used the nice English classroom and then the really nice new Science lab as the meeting room. But I have to say, our open class was very close to what we do normally except the percentages were flipped around. My coteacher had to explain to them that I just arrived so we decided to have her do most of the teaching rather than me for the open class. Oh and the government officials didn't attend the class.. they only showed up at the meeting because our class had too many teachers attending.. there was no room..