Some Great Opportunities : )

Over the past few weeks I have had a few opportunities to participate in professional development workshops and learn more about the Korean education system. The first opportunity was held at my school. My co-teacher and I taught an open class. About thirty teachers came and observed us teach a lesson. Some of the teachers stood in the room, some outside (they took the windows out so people could look through from the hallway) and our school also used a video camera to broadcast the lesson into the school cinema. It was pretty exciting to have so many people watching and critiquing our lesson.

Following the lesson my school held a workshop and in typical Korean fashion, without prior notice, I was asked to speak about team teaching in Korea. That little speech was a blessing in disguise because following the workshop I received two wonderful offers. First, I was asked to make a presentation about team teaching at a conference for all of the elementary English teachers in my province. Second, I was asked to participate in a research study that a professor at a local university is conducting next spring. The professor is a South African lady who has been in Korea for eight years teaching English at the primary level. I have been speaking with her regularly and am very excited about working with her this spring. We will be studying the effects of putting students into reading groups in their English classes. Differentiating instruction is a fairly new concept in Korean education and is very rare in their English as a foreign language education. Differentiation is a concept that I learned a lot about at Dayton and a concept that I will continue to study in reference to English Language Learners (ELL) over the next few months.

This past weekend I made a sixty minute presentation at the Chungnam Province Elementary English Education Conference. I was a bit overwhelmed by the length of the presentation, but it went really well. I was able to show some video clips from my open class and explain how I incorporate many team teaching strategies into my everyday lessons. The director must have liked the presentation because I have been asked to do it again two more times in December!

This sort of opportunity is great practice for making future presentations and helps me to build my professional portfolio. Thank you Korea : )