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Headshot Young Girl

Hanna Oh

SEO24

South Korea

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Challenge

Rather than interacting with students, Korean teachers often deliver lessons one-sidedly. This hasn't changed much since the old days, when teachers would first create a lesson plan, decide what they want to evaluate and how they want to evaluate it, create a lesson map with the topics they want to teach, and distribute learning papers for students to solve. I used to teach this way without being judgmental, but when I became a Google Certified Coach, my perspective on teaching changed a bit. A coach does not immediately tell students the solution, but rather helps them find out for themselves what difficulties they are experiencing and what they need. It's important to keep the communication going along the way, and I've had very little experience with teacher-student communication in the past, and I didn't know how to do that. Students also have little experience in communicating and setting their own goals and moving forward on their own, just memorizing the knowledge that the teacher is delivering. At a time when we desperately need an education that enhances the core competencies (6Cs) of the future: collaboration, communication, content critical thinking, creative innovation, and self-confidence, Korean education hasn't changed much. If we continue to educate without communication, students will continue to live without agency in adulthood. How can we shift the paradigm to one where students are the agents of action, finding their own problems and teachers are the facilitators? For a few years now, teachers in Korea have been applying edtech to their classes. The purpose of using edtech is to actively engage students, but it's unfortunate that it's often used for the knowledge aspect of finding the right answer to a problem or the technical aspect of running a class efficiently.

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