My First Open Class

One of the unique experiences of working in a Korean public school is the fulfilment of the bi-annual "open class" requirement.

The open class is just that-- a class that is advertised and open to any and all visitors, both from within the school, and from other schools in the surrounding area. These visitors observe your "demo lesson" and stick around afterwards to offer crtiques and feedback on what they saw.

To be quite honest, I was dreading having to do this. I really enjoy teaching, but I hate anything that feels remotely like a presentation or a show. As the day of my open class neared, more experienced native teacher friends laughed at my anxiety, telling me not to worry and that it is not such a big deal, while my co-teachers were completely freaking out about it. I was more inclined to trust my Korean co-teachers-- after all, they are more familiar with the importance of the open class for our school and its purpose within the public education system here-- which probably helped me in the preparation stages, but, of course, did nothing for my nerves.

However, my first ever open class was this morning, and I survived.

The topic of my open class was "Let's Talk About Movies." Now that final exams are over for the students, I am free to choose any topic and to use any materials I can get my hands on when creating my lessons for the next month-- which is great because it allows me a level of freedom and flexibility that I ususally don't have. The not-so-great part, however, is that, since exams are over, students are not accountable for anything that they do in class and are therefore completely unmotivated to learn. So, I chose the movie topic in hopes that students would want to be engaged, since movies are something fun that they care about, and because movies would make a great topic of conversation for those who want to make English speaking friends their own age. It is a subject that actually matters to them, and luckily, it was a topic that they turned out to be relatively interested in. The class was far from smooth, but the kids stayed invested, which was huge.

After class, we had a roundtable discussion to elicit feedback from the visiting teachers from surrounding schools. The head of our English department opened the discussion by, I think, trying to discretely apologize for my co-teacher and I-- or perhaps, he was just qualifying our performace-- in saying that he had been worried about me as a "newborn teacher," and emphasizing that both my co-teacher and I had never done an open class before. He added that he was aware that open classes were for demonstration purposes, but that my co-teacher and I had wanted to demonstrate something closer to a real class. Luckily, the other teachers seemed to respond positively to the idea that what they had seen was unrehearsed, and that the lesson was therefore delivered and recieved in a natural way.

The experience overall was a good one. We were critiqued for trying to fit too much into a single class period, being too "academic," having an unbalanced division of speaking time between co-teachers, and for not being thorough enough when checking student comprehension of instructional steps. On the other hand we were commended on our choice of topic, the way that we gave immediate and positive feedback, the high participation and activity level of our students, and our good control of the class (whaattt?? that one shocked me). The visiting teachers gave us very helpful feedback on the lesson that I know is going to make me a better teacher and that I hope to be able to use to open up some avenues of discussion with my co-teachers on just how the logistics of "co-teaching" should play out.

So, after today, while I can't say that I look forward to holding another open class next semester, I now know what a valuable process it can be. I am confident that the information gleaned from the open class experience will be of great benefit to both my students and to me, and that is definitely something to embrace.

(A little side note: I really feel for my friends who are teachers in hagwons-- private language institutes-- who have to do thier open classes for their students' parents, rather than for other teachers. I have a feeling that parents would be a little less constructive in their criticisim, and are bound to view the class through a very different lens [$$] than the teacher...eek. )