Open Class

A requirement for all public school teachers in Korea is to do "open classes." These are typically done once a semester for foreign English teachers, such as myself, but I've been lucky and did my first one yesterday, after being here over a year already.

An Open Class is when we "perform" for the MOE. I say "perform" because we do what the MOE wants to see, not how a usual class is set up. For example, I rarely teach from the book, and I don't take more than a night to lesson plan (usually). This lesson was based on our textbook, and my co-teacher Mihey and I worked on the lesson for at least two weeks. We also rarely co-teach, (2 teachers teaching the same lesson simultaneously) but I do the bulk of the teaching while Mihey is in charge of discipline and sometimes translation.

Our lesson this week focused on the unit "That's Why." The main goals of the open class lesson was to 1) Make questions using "Why," 2) Giving reasons using "Because," and 3) Having fun talking with your group and the class. We chose the advanced level students, class 5/10, because they are the most cooperative, energetic (in a good way), and some of the smartest kids in school. I know that they also have the highest average test scores.

Since they are so advanced, we used the basic forms from the book, but expanded on it. Originally, we were going to talk about after school activities, but Korean students after school activities are very limited, we didn't think this would be exciting for them. We instead chose to focus on emotions, feelings, and appearances.

We began with a teacher role play, asking silly questions about Mihey's hair, and my glasses. The kids died laughing when we put on the props. Mihey's hair might have easily been the highlight of the lesson!



After introducing the key expressions, we asked questions about cartoon characters appearances. The final task was having the students create a chain dialogue that answered the question "Why does he look so mad?" which they did very well. The kids are so creative. We had stories about people eating each other's cake, dropping money down a manhole, dropping money down a drain, kids not doing homework, and parents not giving their son a birthday present. Earlier in the week, we also had dialogues about pooping and peeing, which is about the funniest thing for these 14 year old kids. I'm glad we didn't have any stories like that on the open class day!



There were quite a few teachers who came to watch, including some from other schools. My old co-teacher from Seongdeok Middle School, Hyun Ju, came to watch, unfortunately I didn't get a chance to talk with her because she couldn't stay for the whole lesson. There was one man from the MOE who came to observe, and as it turns out, he is good friends with my principal. They've known each other for about 10 years, maybe that's why we got such raving reviews!

In the end, he said we worked very well together and liked how we tailored the lesson to the students needs/abilities. He also said that this was the best open class he'd ever been to, but he probably says that to everyone. ^^ The other English teachers who were there, Kim Chi Won and Jo Young Ran, were astonished at how the class operated. Even though they teach 2nd grade, the say their students never work together like this class, and how do we get them to help each other? They were very impressed. The students said this was the best lesson all year. They loved the role play and thought that Mihey and I make a good team co-teaching.

They only problem is that we just don't have enough time to plan lessons like this every week!