Open Classes

Last week we had open classes at school.  Open classes are a chance for the children’s parents to visit the school and watch a mock lesson.  The foreign teachers are in charge of the lesson, and the Korean teachers then have a meeting with the parents afterwards.  Since I am the homeroom teacher for two classes, I was in charge of planning the open class for both.

Each of my two classes are comprised of first year students, so it would be the first time that the parents watched a lesson.  Before getting any info about it, I thought of the class as an opportunity to show the parents what the students normally do on a day to day basis at ECC.  I assumed there would be more planning involved, but that the class should be similar to a real lesson.  Was I wrong!

We had to turn in a lesson plan for the open class a month in advance.  Our academic director observed several “practice” sessions during the weeks leading up to the real thing and advised us on how to make the class better.  I was meant to plan every detail, down to the order that the children would speak and exactly what they would say during each activity.  In the end it was more of a performance than a class.  I still tried to keep it rather simple though, because I didn’t want to give the parents a totally warped impression of what classes are typically like.  I think, however, that most of them also knew it was a bit more of a show than a real lesson.

Korean parents have a reputation for
being picky, so I was nervous

Since my youngest class can have trouble staying seated and focused for long amounts of time, the Korean homeroom teacher also was in the classroom during the lesson.  She did a song with the kids at the beginning and tried to help keep them on task.  I thought her song was a bit over the top, but it was nice to have her there in case anything went wrong.  The Korean homeroom teacher for the second class (4 and 5 year olds) also attended the lesson, but she was not as involved.

I was a little nervous going into the lesson, especially with the younger group.  We had practiced several times through and they knew the material pretty well.  Despite the preparation I was worried that the kids would lose interest and then the lesson would seem boring.  One student in particular did not pay much attention during the class.  He is typically the hardest to keep under control and in his seat, but he was actually even more ADD with his mom there.  Luckily Michelle dealt with him, which allowed me to continue with the lesson and focus on the other students.

I was just crossing my fingers that I didn't

have to deal with anyone like this!

With the second, slightly older group of kids, they were generally well behaved during the lesson.  One of the girls started to cry because her mom was late, but she seemed to cheer up after her mom arrived.  Another kid stated to repeat everything that I said when I was giving the lesson.  That got annoying – and distracting – very quickly.  Luckily he stopped after a few minutes.  Overall both lessons went fine; they were not without a few small hiccups, but nothing major went wrong.  I think it would have been unrealistic to expect everything to go perfectly anyway.

The most important part of the lessons were the parents’ reactions.  Both of the Korean teachers that talked to the parents said that they thought I did a good job.  As far as I can tell there were no complaints about me.  Once we were finished it was a big relief, but I also had the students’ monthly progress reports to finish, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time to relax.  It feels good to be done with both, although now I have to fill out online evaluations for the afternoon students.  There always seems to be something else to do!