Gwangju-Jeonnam Chapter January Meeting
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----- Morning Reflective Practice Session -----
Topic: Stories: Past, Present, and Anticipated
Session Facilitators: Jocelyn Wright & Bryan Hale
Time: 11:00 am - 12:30 pm (Sat., Jan. 9)
NEW Location: Aldersgate (올더스게이트), cozy cafe near GNUE. Ground floor of 광주우리교회 Building.
----- Main Meeting Schedule -----
Time: Saturday, January 9, 2016, 1:45 - 5:00 pm
NEW Location: Gwangju National University of Education (GNUE), Teacher Training Center (교사교육센터) 1st Floor; Room 811. Detailed directions HERE.
1:45 pm: Sign-in and Meet-and-Greet (Admission is free. Future membership is welcomed.)
2:00 - 2:50 pm: Presentation 1
Commonly Overlooked Issues with Classroom Management
Brian Burgoyne (Chosun University)
2:50 - 3:10 pm: Refreshment Break
3:10 - 4:00 pm: Presentation 2
The Syl-la-ble: A Teaching Tool for Pronunciation and Memory
Jessica Magnusson (Gwangju National University of Education)
4:10 - 5:00 pm: Swap-Shop Presentations
Share your Teaching Ideas, Classroom Activities, and Teaching Wisdom with the group.
(Everyone is encouraged to share. Short tidbits are welcomed. Handouts also welcomed.)
5:00 pm: Announcements / Drawing for Door Prizes / Closing
Presentation Summaries and Presenter Bio-sketches
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Commonly Overlooked Issues with Classroom Management
By Brian Burgoyne
As educators, we spend a tremendous amount of time on our lessons. There’s research into our topics, reading texts, and constructing visual and audial aides. Don’t forget the bonus task of adjusting your lesson to the varying levels of students. Then there’s the added difficulty of aligning them with the rest of the unit and your school’s curriculum. Every teacher understands this onerous responsibility and appreciates the effort put into creating such lessons. Now if only your students would cooperate…
Classroom management is the one subject in education that has the least amount of time dedicated to it. For those who went to university for teaching, it is often a small component of a larger course taken during one semester before going off to student teach. For those teaching abroad, usually their first experience is the day they walk into school for Day 1 of classes. In either case, the neophyte teacher is left to muddle their way through their first semester or year before finally finding a method that “works” for them. Unfortunately, that’s usually where a teacher’s classroom management skill development stops. Why? Because other concerns are being stressed as more important. Test scores, educational plans, etc. are all given higher priority. Teachers will work harder on improving these than classroom management. However, by neglecting this, they sabotage their efforts to improve the rest.
This subject is one that bears regular scrutiny by educators in the same way we evaluate our daily lessons and yearly curriculum. There are a myriad of books written on the subject and countless psychological studies. However, for the sake of this presentation, I will boil it down to a few issues with classroom management that even the most experienced teachers overlook.
First is the issue of how the teacher is perceived. This issue has multiple components that need to be addressed. These components range from how teachers dress and carry themselves to preparedness and time management. We think of these things as simple, but an alarming number of teachers disregard them. In an environment where all eyes are on you, doing so can be disastrous.
Second is the issue of presence. This is related to perception. A teacher must have an active presence in their classrooms from the moment class begins to the time it ends. The more you lecture, the less your students are engaged. Independent or group work is better for engagement but still not a time for you to check your messages on your phone or to take a quick break. In any case, if you’re always at the front of the room, there’s a very strong chance your students’ attention is somewhere else.
The third issue relates to your lesson itself. What activities did you plan? How did you start the class? How did you end it? Have you prepared your students mentally for the next lesson or are they just aching to get out the door? Everything you’ve been working on for the lesson can be lost if your classroom management is poor.
Every issue we try to focus on is related to how we manage our classrooms. Whether we are the neophyte teacher and know very little, or think it’s common sense and “know” what we’re doing, our classroom management skills require as much effort as our daily lessons. They’re all related and improving one will inevitably improve the other.
The Presenter
Brian Burgoyne is a long-time educator with over 15 years of teaching experience. He has taught in a wide variety of environments to diverse groups of students. Brian has been in Korea for eight years and his most recent position is Assistant Professor of English Language at Chosun University. He enjoys reading, writing, and does “not suffer fools.”
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The Syl-la-ble: A Teaching Tool for Pronunciation and Memory
By Jessica Magnusson
When working with university students on a teacher training course a few years ago, I noticed that many of the students didn’t have a solid grasp on syllables in the English language. Most of them had no prior experience with breaking up longer words into syllables. When I asked the question, “How many syllables are in the word “campus,” I got “3” as a response from many students. When I asked, “How many syllables are in the word ‘blue’?” I got the response of “2” from just as many students. What is happening is that many students of English are adding extra syllables to words. This is something that happens across all ages of English learners.
Since that teacher training course from a few years ago, I’ve begun teaching about syllables to all ages of students, whether it be in English camps, English conversation courses, or teacher training courses. Teaching the skill of breaking up words into syllables proved to be more valuable than I had expected for both pronunciation and memory of words. Many students tend to try to remember words as a string of letters. This has been okay for shorter words but has been insufficient in many cases when students try to remember longer words. I’ve found in some cases that students tend to give up halfway through a longer word or simply don’t remember it. For example, I taught the word “performer” to a group of students and a few students remembered it as “perfor” or “per.” But after teaching about syllables, most of the students were able to remember the word in its entirety, by remembering it as something that consisted of three parts.
This presentation will explain what a syllable is, and examine the reasons why many language learners tend to misidentify syllables. This presentation will include eight simple activities that teachers can use to help their students break up words into syllables. The activities will be geared towards a wide range of ages and language levels.
The Presenter
Jessica Magnusson earned her MA in TESOL from the School for International Training (SIT; USA) in 2005. She has taught general English courses, teacher training courses, and special English camp programs for elementary school students and middle school students at Gwangju National University of Education since 2011. Her work in Korea includes working as a presenter for Oxford University Press and as an English instructor at DongNam Health University in Suwon for three years. Prior to her work in Korea, she taught English at various schools in China for four years.
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Photo: The Teacher Education Center (교사교육센터) at GNUE, our meeting venue, Room 811.
