Stealing English lessons?
Our story today comes from Seoul, where an English teacher at a language institute is alleged to have stolen lectures from another school. She allegedly attended pronunciation training classes at the other school for 3 months, hiding her identity, and then delivered exactly the same classes at her school. She is now accused of copyright infringement and theft of business secrets.
The accused teacher claims that she did not deliberately hide her identity, and a spokesperson from her school says that he doesn’t understand how attending classes at another institute for personal development can infringe copyright.
Her accusers, however, apparently showed some of their students transcripts of the accused teacher’s class, and they all agreed that the content was the same in both classes.
This case aside, how far should teachers go when applying other teachers’ methods in their classes? The article quotes one English teacher who took several lectures for non-native English learners prior to teaching a TOEFL preparation course, in order to “learn how to run a class and attract students”. Clearly there is a difference between using a few techniques and activities in your own classes that you’ve learned from other teachers, and copying a school’s entire methodology word for word. But where should we draw the line? Post a comment below…
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January 10th, 2007 at 9:38 am
This is a no-brainer. If guilty, this teacher in Seoul has obviously gone too far. But the ESL teaching world relies on the sharing of imaginative ideas and methods. How would we develop as teachers if we never used someone esle’s idea?