Unit 3: The Content

🧭 Unit 3: The Content

Teaching EFL in Korea isn’t just about the language—it’s about navigating contradictory expectations, fuzzy boundaries, and often, a total lack of guidance. Some schools micromanage every lesson (“submit your syllabus, weekly schedule, and handouts for the semester by Friday 🧾”), while others toss you a book with no training and say, “Just… talk to them 😅.”

So how do you show up for students when the only structure is chaos?

Let’s start with something uncomfortable.

❗ Hard Truth: Just speaking English is not teaching English.

And just being “native” doesn’t make you a teacher. Even if you're charming. Even if you're good with kids. Even if your TikTok classroom skits get likes.

Teaching is a profession. It’s a skillset. And it’s also an ethical relationship between you and your learners.

I get it—some of us (my younger self included) landed in Korea thinking we’d just “figure it out as we go.” But untrained teaching is a disservice—to our students, to our co-teachers, and to ourselves.

What happens when we wing it?

  • Learners lose trust in English as a meaningful skill (they know when class is fluff).

  • Korean co-teachers burn out from having to manage both their class and your role.

  • We perpetuate a pipeline of educational inequity—where native speakers are brought in as decoration rather than as co-educators.

🌱 So here’s the invitation:
Instead of pretending to be the “expert,” become a facilitator of learning. Help students connect, notice, reflect, and communicate. Focus on designing meaningful moments, not just “speaking practice.”

Let’s explore some practical tools—and I’ll share what I actually use (and why):

🧰 What’s In My Content Toolbox (and Why I Still Use It)

🧑‍🏫 For foundational grounding:

  • Larry Ferlazzo’s "Best Of" Lists → These are not just clickbait titles. I still return to them when I'm blocked on how to explain “gerunds” in context or need a critical pedagogy activity that isn’t too abstract.
    🔗 https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/about/my-best-of-series/

  • Canva for Educators → Listen, I used to spend hours on Word formatting. Now I make visually accessible materials—syllabi, sentence strip activities, vocabulary bingo—with drag-and-drop ease.
    🔗 https://www.canva.com/education/

👶 For Young Learners (because movement + repetition = gold):

👩‍🔬 For ESP (English for Specific Purposes):

The key isn’t finding “perfect” materials—it’s choosing content that reflects what learners want to do with English.

📓 Planning Hacks I Wish I Knew Earlier:

  • Instead of reinventing the wheel, start with a basic ESL lesson plan template (Google it). Add only what serves your learners.

  • Feeling overwhelmed? Try AI (yes, even ChatGPT). I’ve had it help me build warm-up questions, reorder steps, and suggest writing prompts. But I never copy-paste—I adapt.

🎬 Practice Challenge I Give Myself (Still!):

  • Teach something I don’t know well. Like… astrophysics 🤯.

  • Record it. Watch. Cringe.

  • Reflect on where I got stuck.
    This isn’t masochism—it helps me stay humble. It reminds me how it feels to be a beginner.

That empathy? That’s the real content we’re teaching.

💬 Final Thought

Too many new teachers think content is what fills the hour. But meaningful content isn’t about worksheets, it’s about presence. It’s about building brave space for students to try, stumble, and try again. It’s about knowing your learners—not just the lesson plan.

And that’s where the real teaching begins.

Find more chapters of Prof Dev 4 EFL here.

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