Teachers Share their Experiences While Living Abroad!

When I first started working with Chungdahm over a year ago, having never taught before, I learned that kids can complete activities much quicker than you expect. It’s always good to have a short game or craft if you have extra time at the end of class. Here are a few of my favorite games, they are little to no prep and my students love them! They can easily take anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes depending on how much time you have, and they’re great for reviewing key concepts.  

If you work as a Chungdahm teacher in Korea, you’ll get a week long training session to prepare you for your first day of teaching. You learn about the curriculum, the smart boards, the tablet PCs, and the methodology. Also, it’s heavily geared towards learning how to have good learning management. It’s great because when it comes to teaching, there are two things teachers need to perfect: learning management and student management. While there are student management simulations integrated into the training week, there is just no way to truly anticipate what your students will be like. I found that having good classroom rules and a stern attitude towards enforcing them from DAY 1 is how to set the appropriate tone for your classroom.

The last few weeks have been a blur with the wrap up of winter term, thirteen weeks done and dusted. With the chaos of intensives and the recent holidays, it was nice to be able to catch my breath for a bit. But amidst all I had to get done, I didn’t have much time to write. I asked my boss, Michael, on recommendations for topics because my brain was more fried than kimchi rice at 4 am. He suggested writing about the best teaching experience of my life, and the timing of it all was so strange, because after I received this, I went on to in fact, have the best teaching experience of my life.

It is such a whirlwind running around preparing for your contract teaching, especially with transitioning to life in South Korea. Oftentimes, you start training bright and early the Monday after you get in, with minimal time for time zone adjustment or sightseeing. It can feel chaotic, so here are a few words from someone who’s gone through two separate training sessions and contracts, one with April and one with CDI.

Perhaps the most daunting part about taking on a teaching job is having to create a lesson plan for every single lesson. Some struggle with every aspect of it. Others may be skilled at creating lesson plans, but it is time consuming regardless of how skilled the teacher. ChungDahm Learning is a well-established and well-organized education company that has a fully-developed curriculum in place. One simply needs to perform the lesson delivery for the lessons that have been prepared.

I had the pleasure of working with Matthew Ellis (Matt Teacher) at our branch, and now I will share my interview with him. Matt is an English teacher from Massachusetts and has been teaching for around seven years. His major was English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Philosophy (yikes!) He has a passion for gaming, culture, and diplomacy. Matt’s family is located back in the States, but he plans to continue here in Seoul in order to get his Masters in Linguistics. Matt says it’s nice to meet you!

Now that I have been working for Chungdahm Learning for some time, I find it only appropriate to share some teaching wisdom. There are two concepts that I find to be essential to master in order to be a good Chungdahm teacher (or a good teacher in general) - WH Questions and Cold Calling.

Congratulations on becoming a ChungDahm teacher! As a ChungDahm teacher myself, I want to share my top five teaching tips that will shed some light into my own personal teaching style, philosophy, and experiences, all of which will help you in your exciting new journey. Let’s begin.