Korean government to create blacklist of "incompetent" native speaker English teachers.

Kang Shin-who writes this evening in the Korea Times:

Elementary and secondary schools plan to create a black list of ``incompetent'' native English speakers and to ask immigration not to reissue English-teaching or E-2 visas to them.

Also, the schools will share individual assessments of foreign teachers among themselves. About 23,000 instructors are working in Korea, among them 8,000 are at the schools.

. . .

The National Institute for International Education (NIIED) will team up with the association to evaluate their performance. But it has not yet made public what objective criteria will be used in concluding whether they are competent or not.

Indeed, it will be vitally important to learn what the criteria are and whether they're "objective." As I've written nearly every time NSETs come up, no planning or support goes into using native speaker English teachers in school. If there is no plan in place for using these teachers, there can also not be a system for evaluating them. You can't evaluate teachers on certain standards when they were not held to them throughout the contract.

Furthermore, when schools aren't prepared to use native speaker English teachers, it's also likely that schools and teachers aren't familiar with the teaching styles used by them (and, vice versa, native speaker English teachers aren't familiar with the methods used among Koreans). Will a teacher get marked down for having students move around and talk to one another? Those are certainly foreign techniques to the Korean classroom, but ones that might fit in well when teaching how to communicate in English. I anticipate a lot of evaluations that say "Brian is good teacher. He is handsom guy^^" or "mr. Brian is not good. He is not smile and his class is not funny." Do Korean teachers and administrators, most of whom learned English from other Koreans with even worse English then them, really have the faintest idea how to evaluate native speaker English teachers?

When I looked at another Times article "12% of Native English Teachers Dismissed at Schools in Ulsan"---which took that angle in spite of some 88% of teachers apparently doing just fine---I brought up other reasons for teachers not to have their contracts renewed. Here's what the article had to say:

The office [of education] said that it has not renewed their contracts after judging their methods to be inappropriate for teaching students in English.

A written survey was conducted to determine how many acted decently, how faithful they were to their duty, how well they guided students and how well they taught English.

. . .

Among the dismissed were those who often yelled at students, argued with Korean teachers assisting them and wore indecent clothes. Some had to visit hospital too often for weight problems and some refused to teach after school, according to the survey.

There are of course bad teachers, unprofessional teachers, lazy teachers, and teachers who for whatever reason just don't fit in Korea. But there are also good teachers who find themselves at bad schools, or who find themselves paired with rotten co-teachers. There are teachers who want to try another school, another level, or another city. And, in keeping in line with those comments in the Times piece, there are teachers who dislike having to teach all kinds of afterschool classes and workshops, which are in fact not mandatory. You can bet a teacher who chooses not to re-sign because of a bad co-teacher, an unsatisfactory apartment, or unpaid overtime won't be given a fair hearing.

It's interesting to note, too, that native speaker English teachers aren't given the opportunity to evaluate the Korean English teachers at the school. At the end of each year NSETs are given a questionnaire where they answer a few questions about their school, their apartment, their coworkers, and so on, but it's not confidential and can be, and probably is, seen by the other English teachers at the school. Many NSETs do have legitimate complaints about their co-teachers---teachers who do not come to class, teachers who do not come to the mandatory workshops, teachers who do not participate in class, teachers who sleep in class, teachers who are violent with students, teachers who can neither understand nor use English, or teachers who are just not very good---yet nobody learns about it. Instead it's the NSET who pays for bad relationships and bad classes, it's the NSET who isn't re-signed, and it's the NSET, if this plan goes into place, who will be blacklisted.

Today's article continues:

NIIED, which runs the English Program in Korea, or EPIK, will play a central role in operating training programs for the foreigners.

The government also plans to mandate new native teachers to participate in training programs for 10 days or more. During the programs, they can learn about skills used in teaching and managing classes along with Korean culture.

I've been reading about these evaluation programs on Facebook, on forums, and on other blogs. I wrote about these mandatory training programs on this site and in the Korea Herald, saying

[W]hat's "practical," what's vital for native-speaker English teachers, is an understanding of the Korean classroom and how they fit into it. I've written numerous times that most of the challenges that accompany NSETs are due to the lack of planning and support they receive and to the ambiguous role they fill in the system, and any new training session needs to address these concerns.

A new teacher doesn't need a lecture about kimchi -- he'll get it often enough at mealtime -- but would benefit from presentations on lesson planning for a class of 40. A foreign teacher doesn't need a lesson on how to pour drinks Korean-style -- she'll get one from her friends later -- but will need to learn how to fit into the teachers' office. An orientation doesn't need a mundane lecture on Hangeul---teachers take the initiative to learn on their own -- but NSETs should be given the opportunity to take Korean classes while here. Teachers -- some of whom have never taught before -- need to be acclimated to the Korean classroom as quickly as possible through practical lessons from experienced NSETs, not from teachers or bureaucrats who don't understand the NSET experience.

Training sessions need to focus on the classroom and how English is taught, and thus need to include Korean English teachers. It's been several years since NSETs have been introduced, yet schools are still unclear about how they're to be used. With some co-teachers, NSETs work as pronunciation guides, with others they split time, and in some cases the co-teacher doesn't show up for class or workshops at all.

I'd like to bring it back to the article about those 12% of teachers in Ulsan; here's what the article said:

The office [of education] said that it has not renewed their contracts after judging their methods to be inappropriate for teaching students in English.

A written survey was conducted to determine how many acted decently, how faithful they were to their duty, how well they guided students and how well they taught English.

The key there is "methods to be inappropriate for teaching students in English." But what exactly are appropriate methods? I've seen co-teachers walk around the room with bamboo sticks, scaring students shitless and preventing any communication from going on at all. I've seen co-teachers sleep during our class, I've seen co-teachers leaf through newspapers when they should be helping, and I've seen co-teachers conduct English classes entirely in Korean. Don't put words in my mouth and act like I think all teachers do this, but I've seen enough classes to ask why there's so much attention paid to NSET methodology when plenty of bad Korean teachers are permitted to stay (they're not evaluated by us, the witnesses, as I've already said). I wrote about it in the Korea Herald in May, asking if English classes in Korean or classes controlled by violence follow appropriate methodology:

We recently read that 12 percent of native speaker English teachers in Ulsan were "expelled" from their jobs. The report said that the teachers were let go because they had "methods ... inappropriate for teaching students in English." It is certainly the district's or the school's prerogative to hire or fire whomever they please, and there is no doubt some that deserve to go. However, the information and the way it was reported reveal two big problems frequently seen in media coverage of teachers. It is consistent with a trend to portray foreign English teachers in an unfairly negative way, and it begs the question why Korean teachers' methods are, as a whole, not under similar scrutiny.

To put a less cynical spin on it, it leads us to ask what exactly is expected of us, what ought to be done when the way NSETs exist in the popular imagination contrast with the reality of the English classroom here. Otherwise, a bad teacher is simply a product of a bad system: either the system that couldn't accommodate him, or one that hired him without scrutiny in the first place.

Instead of announcing schools will evaluate native speaker English teachers and blacklist bad ones, and instead of announcing with much fanfare that there will now be mandatory training programs to address deficiencies, why not first come up with a plan for NSETs and see it through, and why not first offer training programs that address the problems NSETs face. By creating more ways to make bad teachers, they're simply moving closer to not having any NSETs in the classrooms at all. Hey, wait a minute . . .