Korean Job Discussion Forums

[big_fella1]

A question for the qualified teachers. I have been offered a corporate gig. When I asked them did they have a curriculum established they told me yes they have a textbook.

I am concerned as I feel that a textbook whilst being part of a curriculum does not equal a curriculum. Am I being pedantic?

I am not from a professional teaching background, but to me the curriculum is the set of experiences that you want the student to go through in the course. It would include goal setting and then finding the tools that would help the student reach those goals. It would include activities, exercises and theory. It would include checks that the student was understanding the material and reviews both by me and their peers. Some of these things may indeed be in a textbook, some of them would be required from me and some would need to be developed.

Is curriculum development so expensive?

When I first came to Korea, I used to take these gigs on the basis that, if you pretend to pay me, i'll pretend to work. Now I am married and going to be living here for a while, I want to do good work. I feel that I would rather refuse work than do a bad job because there wasn't enough preparation done in advance.

So my question: Is a textbook enough or should I run away? (btw, the course starts next week.)

Thanks in anticipation of your feedback.

PS Thank you for those who take the time to grammar correct the above as I haven't proofread it.

[spyro25]

sent to pm instead

[spyro25]

request -

if you do end up doing the plan i told you about, could you please let me know in detail how you did it and how it went? i'm doing my ph.d on this very subject.

thanks

spyro25

[smoggy]

In the US I am a substitute teacher, and have been for 7 years. The literacy program goes through a weeks of work broken up in 5 parts. They listen to a story and the teacher asks questions about the pictures, what came next. They hear it 2 or 3 times during the week. They do the calendar daily and do simple math facts. Then they write something about the story etc. This is part of the curriculum - not the curriculum itself. The teachers always give supplemental worksheets. Whether they color pictures of things that start with H etc.

[lifeinkorea]

In theory, we can build anything to fit a set class of students. However, when you interact with each class, they have their own strengths as weaknesses. Mozart for example composed his music knowing exactly who the french horn player was. He wrote to their level and style, not just the instrument.

I like the idea of only being given a book. Then, I get to carve out, add in, and combine things to fit the students.

If there was a set curriculum, I am afraid it wouldn't be all that fun. Perhaps, at a college level, you need to establish a wide set of standards. In this case, I agree, there has to be more structure. However, with younger kids and teens, the focus should be more on the present communication you can have with the students. Try to make your time with them valuable for both you and the students.

[Conrad B Hart]

[Carla]

[D.D.]

Find out the goals and needs of your clients then make the stuff up. It's not difficult. I write the stuff from scratch for 28 classes aweek. I find live programs that are specific are much better than canned stuff like textbooks.

[dragon777]

The answer to your question is yes.

[wakingup]

Does the book have a teacher's version? If so, that probably has some supplementary things. Does the textbook have practice books along with it?

My school has textbooks, teacher's guides to go with them, and practice books to go along. Basically, to me, that's a curriculum. Do I still have to create worksheets, tests, and other materials? Yes. But so do most teachers in North America unless they teach some really structured program, which would actually suck, as it wouldn't allow for improvement and customizing it to the class/students/teacher/etc.

In Korea, if the school has a textbook they have consistently used, I'd consider that relatively organized.

ETA:

[iggyb]

It depends on what you mean by "textbook".

In most of the hakwons I worked at, the textbook was just one book - one book in a series of levels.

But, in something like a public school in the US or in college, the textbook comes with a variety of other material with the textbook being the main component but ample support with other material - often including multimedia.

When I taught adults in Korea, we just had one textbook that didn't have much in it. It was hard to mine the lessons offered. But, since adult students only cared about free talking free talking free talking free talking -- it was not hard to fill up a class.

The main thing I'd say is - you've got the Internet. If the institute does not work you to death and/or jerk you around to the point you are too exhausted and too unmotivated to care --- you can find a lot of other material that connects in some manner with what even a single textbook has. If you have technology in the classroom, the field is even more wide open.

I wouldn't turn the job down just because it only has one book to use in class. I might factor it in, but it wouldn't be a big influence on my decision.

And if the textbook is a good one - with a variety of material and exercises, it can be the bulk of the class by itself...

At minimum, a textbook is a curriculum because it defines long term what you'll be working on. It provides a basic structure/direction to what you are doing --- for example, you don't have to think about what grammar points your going to work on now and next week and next month and throughout the semester or whatever timetable your class is on.

With the Internet, you can work much with just that limited set planning in a typical ESL textbook.

[D.D.]

Can't get much farther from conversational English than a textbook is.

[mr. positive]

From everything I've ever seen, in those kinds of gigs they expect you to come up with a curriculum because they don't have any idea what to do in that regard. They tell a recruiter they need a teacher, and the recruiter chooses and textbook and then provides a teacher (or sometimes there's no recruiter, or the recruiter asks the teacher to select a textbook, etc.). But basically as I understand it, doing the curriculum is kind of what they're paying you for, or at least that's the way I think they see it.

I used to do a lot of privates, and I found that over time basically all of my students had similar needs, just at different levels and with slight differences in what we did with our time. I developed a repertoire of skills to teach, materials, and exercises to do. I think with enough practice most anyone can do a better or worse job at that. You will almost certainly find it to be more rewarding and productive than going through some crappy hagwon "curriculum" which is often little more than a list of dates and what page numbers to do on those dates!

[Manner of Speaking]

There is an ongoing debate about the utility of textbooks when teaching an ESL class, and a lot of people argue justly that a textbook by itself does not equal a curriculum. But it's important to remember what a textbook is: simply a collection of interrelated teaching/learning tasks, that has (hopefully) been designed to work together.

As the textbook market for ESL is fairly competitive, most textbooks nowadays have to be fairly well-designed and thought out before they make it to the publishing stage. As a result, many textbooks CAN work as a complete, integrated curriculum all by themselves...however, it is rare for a teacher to run across a textbook that completely covers all and only those curriculum aspects that the teacher wants to teach. But its true that a lot of people choose a textbook as a substitute for thinking out and developing a curriculum, when really the latter should happen before the former.

One thing to keep in mind is that a textbook has a lot of utility to the student. In many ways, learning a second language is a bit like being dropped into the middle of a language 'ocean' that goes on in all directions forever. To the beginning student, a textbook can act as an 'island' in that ocean, serving as a reference point that the student can always go back to/look back to no matter how far they advance in the language. When learning a second language, it's easy to forget a lot of the stuff you have been taught or have learned. Having a textbook to look back to is really helpful.

Also, completing a textbook or a series of textbooks can give a student a sense of milestones in their language acquisition process...though obviously no textbook or series of textbooks can raise a student to the level of proficiency or fluency on its own.

It's key, of course, to choose the right textbook and get familiar with what factors the teacher considers essential when choosing a good textbook. My feeling about textbooks and their relationship to a curriculum is that they are a good starting point, but if the teacher wants to go beyond the textbook, there's no reason why they shouldn't.

[iggyb]

I taught in hakwons before, and from hearing that public school instructors only see a class once a week, I imagine this below is the same for it:

Because students were coming in and out month to month, and/or instructors were being switched around month to month, having a long term map of where you were going wasn't important, because most of the students in your classes wouldn't be ones you were going to work with class to class long term.

So, what worked was building up of routines that worked for you with different types of students and a focus on a handful of key points.

With very young kids, I worked on phonics -- consonant and verb combinations using some games and chants.

With older students, including adults, I worked on common past tense verb tenses - especially simple past and was ~ing with simple past...

I also used supplemental books like Essential Idioms that focused on very common idioms that can be confusing to a non-native speaker --- like how many phrases use the term "up".

After about a year teaching in Korea, I had a handful of routines I was confident with and could pull them out at a moments notice and be effective. Once you've got a fair amount, it becomes a matter of repetition and finding a new one here and there.

And this is added to whatever book the class uses as the main text.

It isn't a thought out long term developmental plan. It's a repertoire.