Korean Job Discussion Forums

[raewon]

Here are a few quick questions regarding Teacher's Guides (for anyone
interested in responding)

1. What are the most/least helpful aspects of a TG you've used?

2. When a TG specifically states how much time "should" be alloted for
each activity, does this actually help you with time management?

No, this isn't for a dissertation. One day I'd like to reinvent
the TG.

[mld]

Some teachers guides are helpful, some are completely useless.

The best ones have many different questions to ask (very important, simply saying "discuss where animals live", like I get on many lesson plans is both vague and unhelpful), or things to point out to students. The good ones (in my opinion) have a lot of activities clearly explained, materials listed (so that anyone could understand) and have very clear outcomes. Tests are also helpful.

When making lesson plans (the few times I've actually had to do them), I've added in time amounts for each part of the lesson (since they were made specifically for my class and another at my school), but this approach is not necessarily helpful in Korea.

Most of the textbooks we use at my school are meant to be used over the course of a whole year, yet we tend to fly through the books in three months. We zip through units at the pace of about one a week, which is not sufficient time to teach the vocabulary and sentence structures as well as could be. More often than not, we must completely ignore most of what is in the teacher's guide as we don't have time to even do a half-@**ed job of it. You could make a textbook with TG that's meant to be done in three months, but I'm sure they'd try to do it in 1.... sometimes I shake my head...

[raewon]

Thanks for your opinion.

I agree that the better guides provide lots of ways (specific questions or otherwise) to elicit specific language/language functions. As you stated, the objectives must also be clear. I've always followed the line of thought that good objectives must be both observable and measurable.

When you included the times for your lessons, how strictly were you able to adhere to them? Had you overestimated or underestimated?

[son of coco]

I saw some teacher's guides on a co-teacher's desk the other day and that's pretty much the first time I noticed they existed. We're not big on giving the teachers any resources to do their job with at my school.

[mld]

[mld]

[laoshihao]

My teacher's guides were in Korean. So, yeah, they were helpful. My co would try to translate them for me, but she didn't always have the time. Eventually, we stopped using them and just augmented the text with bogglesworld stuff and youtube videos.

[laoshihao]

mld, my first semester was like that. We had two books and were trying to plow throw both at the same time. I think it was just more confusing for the students. One book was conversation and the other was for listening (bores the students to death). So second semester we dropped the listening book and used the conversation book to base the lessons off. Then we'd pull youtube videos for their listening exercises. There was a huge improvement in speaking and listening ability after that since the videos were for language they could actually use out in the English speaking world. Instead of some BS paragraph about dinosaurs or Jimmy's violin, we had them watching things like a consumer report (shopping unit), a mock job interview (jobs unit), and Where the Hell is Matt? (travel unit). The travel unit was the last thing we did, but you could see the progress when they used phrases and structures from the shopping unit and jobs unit to talk about purchasing mock tours from an imaginary travel agency to places in the Matt video.

[ddeubel]

Teacher's Guides are just that - guides. Not too be followed in any strict sense but as something to lean on for "guidance". Many have ideas and classroom language that can be borrowed for good effect. But depends. The guide is only as good as the person interpreting it.

[mld]

[ddeubel]