On native speaker English teacher evaluations.

When I become middle-aged and washed-up I think I'll put out a collection of B-sides as a way to make money. Those would be all the half-finished posts I didn't publish, articles I never saw through, and links I never got around to sharing.

One of those B-sides is a column I was working on for the Korea Herald last winter about native speaker English teacher evaluations. It was my busiest couple months in Korea, and between classes, immigration issues, repatriation, and visa paperwork, I ended up leaving Korea before I came close to finishing the piece.

Anyway, by way of reintroduction to the issue you may remember Kang Shin-who wrote in the Korea Times last December that native speaker English teachers were to be evaluated and that the government would create a blacklist of "incompetent" native speaker English teachers.

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.

Teacher evaluations are a touchy subject for many teachers in Korea, not just foreign ones, and were making headlines last winter around the same time as Kang's article. It's a topic way beyond the scope of this post---here's a brief introduction---but in our questioning the qualifications of the evaluators we do have common ground with critics of the larger-scale evaluations.

In my lengthy December 29th post I took exception to a number of points of this plan. My criticisms then are ones that runs through a lot of my commentary on the native speaker English teacher experiment in the public schools, and you might want to read through it and my other posts for lengthier discussion on it. To summarize, there is no plan in place for using them, and no standard by which to evaluate them. Korean English teachers lack training in teaching side-by-side with native speakers, lack the familarity with the teaching styles westerners bring to the language classroom, lack the familiarity with the NSET's contract and what is expected of him or her, lack the means to teach a communication-based English class within the "teach for tests" curriculum, and in far too many cases lack the English proficiency required to teach the language and communicate effectively with their co-teacher. Given that context, and the way NSETs are seen and imagined in the schools, it is expected that evaluations don't go much beyond superficial comments on appearance and demeanor.

In addition, native speaker English teachers aren't given the same opportunities to evaluate their Korean co-teachers, as I will show in a couple paragraphs. I grant that Korean teachers, with stronger ties to the school and obviously to the country, will be given authority and a voice to help shape the English program. But when you have Korean English co-teachers who don't come to class, who don't attend the mandatory workshops, who don't participate in lesson planning, who don't have an adequate knowledge of English for instruction or communication, who behave violently toward students, who falsify attendance records for workshops and afterschool classes, and who fail their students and co-teachers in other ways, the complete lack of accountability is unacceptable. It is unfair and inaccurate to suggest that all Korean English teachers possess those unpleasant characteristics. But considering the attention paid to "unqualified" and "incompetent" foreign English teachers, it is proper to look inadequate Korean English teachers, who after all do most of the instruction in the English education business. It is troubling that Korean English teachers have the power to dismiss, and potentially "blacklist" a foreign teacher they for whatever reason don't like, while that NSET's comments on punctuality, professionalism, proficiency, and other p-words aren't taken into consideration. There is ultimately no accountability for what does and doesn't go on in Korea's English classrooms.

When the end of our one-year contracts approach, we are given a short questionnaire about our experiences at the school and in the country. The open-ended questions include:

+ What has been your greatest challenge in Korea and what kind of impact did it have on your stay in Korea?
+ Do you believe that your apartment was adequate? Was there anything missing that you feel you needed?
+ Have you ever had a confrontation or argument with your co-teacher or other members of your school?
+ What have you liked best about Korea?
+ What have you liked least of Korea?

It is of course completed in English, is given to our primary co-teacher for perusal, and may be seen by our other coworkers with no hint of anonymity.

On the other hand, Korean co-teachers and administrators are given a lengthy questionnaire in Korean with

DO NOT SHOW OR DISCUSS THIS MATERIAL WITH YOUR NATIVE SPEAKER.

on top, to be completed in Korean, on a number of points that given their often infrequent participation in classes and workshops, they are unable to answer. The questionnaire for Jeollanam-do teachers was circulated in May and June, and I have uploaded it for anyone interested. The form has room for the primary co-teacher and the principal to comment on puntuality, lesson planning and organizational skills, inter-personal skills, effectiveness in the classroom, and mental and physical health. There is also a page for workshop participants to comment on the class.

To conclude, the evaluation process pretty well follows the NSET experience in that it's more about appearance than performance or education. The co-teachers who take no interest in workshops or lesson planning of course aren't qualified in the least to comment on what a native speaker English speaker does and whether s/he does it effectively. That Korea Times article from December 2009 said:

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.

Neither the NIIED nor the schools have decided on "objective criteria," and based on the evaluations currently used, are not taking them into consideration. The current standards measure, vaguely, professionalism and courtesy, two important things that will serve an expatriate well in most situations. But in an English-education system with no real curriculum for the NSET, no ultimate goal, and no way to measure success, there is of course no way to evaluate the teacher as a teacher based on standards that don't exist.