Teach English in South Korea, World English Service Ltd. - Phone Teaching

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	The Split-Shift Factor The Kindergarten Factor Class Preparation & Planning	Assessment & Homework Reporting to Parents Extra or Special Classes	Phone Teaching

Phone Teaching

Recently a few Directors have ?spread the word? that a good publicity trick to promote the school to parents is to advertise that their child will receive one on one phone teaching with a foreign teacher.

The concept of phone teaching is relatively new to the market and some employees are now being required to suddenly do extra time consuming tasks out of their normal class hours, which they will most likely not be paid for. The directors are often expecting this will ?just happen? at the end of your teaching day when you want to get home!

You may get a request/demand something like, "please just 1-5 students and talk for a few minutes to each student." It sounds simple but the reality is that any Korean answering a home phone may not have a clue who you are or why you are calling. It may mean that you have to grab a Korean teacher to explain it in Korean first. Then the phone is handed back to you, hopefully with your student on the other end.

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This can cause considerable confusion and annoyance to the teacher. And is a lot more time consuming and complicated than the director will believe. Generally phone teaching is not mentioned in a contract and it would not come under the preparation factor at all. IT IS AN EXTRA and you need to know if there is a payment factor or not.

Our advice is that you politely state your present contract conditions and class hours, along with a summary of the prep time you are putting in as non-paid, then make any deal in writing about the time involved and the payment.

For example, it is no use saying you will ?phone talk? to 5 pupils a day if you can?t get hold of 3 of them in the day, officially they won?t have been phoned and you are not completing your task. Make it a negotiated time factor and a specific payment. Also, try setting a final departure date from the school. You don?t want to be sitting there at 8pm trying to phone your students to say hello and you certainly wont get them at home during the day. The obvious time for getting to speak with a student, is in the evening so don?t be deceived as to the true time factor that could be involved.

Possible Solutions

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A good idea is to set yourself up 2 real phones that you can take to classes to role-play a conversation on the phones in your classroom. This way you can have set conversations you all know the questions and answers for, then when (or if) you have to do a real phone teaching situation with a student, it appears fluent and confident for the student and if a parent is standing listening, they will ?glow with pride? thinking their student is learning well. In other word look for what will make this a simple thing to work your way around rather than a "sticking point of anger and annoyance". If you can't beat it, join it and work around it.

Design & development by Karere.

Cellphones for everyone including monks

Cellphones for everyone including monks