Since we lacked enough staff to handle the regular school day in addition to the summer camp classes, which ran alongside each other during the day, I created a schedule that specified which teachers should teach which classes. I did my best to have one teacher doing Circle Time and the first period each day. We had to tag team teach for the second and third periods. Thankfully, two Korean teachers worked out times that they were available so that the foreign teachers could have their contractual lunch during lunch and recess period.
Scheduling was very difficult from the beginning of my time at MLC. Many teachers found that they did not have enough planning time, and they were not able to collaborate with each other on different projects or ideas. I proposed this new schedule to the director since we were going into a new year with new classes in which foreign teachers would not need to teach every single class.
Due to the imbalance of new students and teaching staff, this schedule was not used. However, I was still able to squeeze in professional learning community meetings on a biweekly basis with the appropriate grade levels meeting at the same time. They were appreciative of this time .
I did my own research on learning and trans shared the information with staff.
I arranged for teachers to visit a conference but the director preferred in-house training.
My goal is to have professionals in the field come to school annually for special workshops.
Another goal is to have teachers reading specific books or studies for professional development to be discussed on staff development days.
Yulchon Middle School Staff Development Trip to Jeju
In this video, I take teachers on the journey of laws and regulations to understand about teaching in S. Korea, especially for early learners.
Learn About KOTESL: A great event to get your teachers thinking seriously about English teaching.
At this school, it was the first time that I had experienced all teachers gathering every month to discuss their curriculum. The school was very focused on teacher created curriculum, so we would come up with what we would like to do each month with our own students as a team of four teachers per classroom. We needed to find a way to intertwine the English curriculum with the Chinese curriculum so that the students would end up bilingual and knowledgeable in various subjects using both languages. Each time we had to present our lessons to the rest of the teachers in the entire school, receiving and offering feedback.
We also had a separate biweekly meetings for teachers reading books and studies together, sharing their research with each other led by the vice principal. Teachers came from various backgrounds and in order to make sure that everyone was able to align with the mission and vision of Daohe in particular, we needed to study the methods of Montessori, Waldorf and Reggio Emilia in addition to the classics of Chinese education.
We also had school-wide staff meetings regularly, in which we would understand the budget and timeline of the school in terms of different events we wanted or needed to host and the general direction of school activities. This is how the teachers were able to collaborate better with the marketing team as well as the financial department to make sure that things ran smoothly. The chefs were also able to teach teachers the reason for using certain foods during certain seasons which led back to teacher curriculum. We needed our students to understand why we eat certain foods and how they were healthy for us during certain times of the year.