In my adult life I have moved around a lot. Most of these moves have been for work related reasons and I made the conscious choices to make these moves. The majority of them have been welcoming, exciting and filled with happy anticipation. However, even when a move is planned and something that we want, it stirs up a variety of strong feelings.

In the days leading up to the date of my departure for South Korea to embark on a journey that would see me teach for a year at a Girls’ Middle School, I began to experience feelings of worry and trepidation that I had never felt before when preparing to move to a new country.

Perhaps the root cause of this was the reason why I had decided to move to South Korea. I had split from my long-term girlfriend and the emotional scar left by that experience was not healing all that well. I felt very alone.

When we experience loss, we often revert back to the reptilian (primitive) part of our brain and become very insular. We cannot progress until we find that our needs are met. In my case, the foundations that had made me feel secure were suddenly not there anymore, and I felt I wouldn’t be able to build new ones if I stayed where I was. 

After reading this article on overcoming loneliness, I realized that I needed to surround myself with new people that I could make new connections with. And what better way to surround yourself with people than to become a teacher? And what better way to make new connections than move to a country with a culture you have never experience before? So, I decided to go and teach English in South Korea.

When I first arrived in South Korea, I felt nervous and maybe even a little bit scared. Two emotions I had not felt before when moving to a new country. But, I soon realized that I had made the right choice by deciding to teach as I was immediately surrounded by kind, positive people in the staff room, and being thrust in front of 35 students with no prior teaching experience very quickly woke my mind from the idle, depressed state it had been in for the previous few months. 

I found this new culture fascinating and the interest that both colleagues and students showed in me helped me to feel at home almost immediately. I made friends quickly and had no time to feel lonely as I fought to get to grips with teaching 400 teenage girls how to speak English.

Something that helped me greatly to improve both as a teacher and in my mental health was reflection.

Reflection is concerned with consciously looking at and thinking about our experiences, actions, feelings and responses and the interpreting or analyzing them in order to learn from them.

In an effort to try and improve my teaching, I stumbled across the idea of reflective practice and found the Learning Cycle model put forth by David Kobb to be of particular interest as it directly related to my preferred method of teaching, that of experiential learning.

As my lessons were not tested, I had to try and find other ways to motivate the students to learn. After giving it some thought, I concluded that if the children were motivated to do well in tests then, surely, the same would apply for learning skills that would be useful to them in life. 

So, I started to develop role-play lessons (experiential learning) that would give the students ‘real-life’ practical skills, such as asking for directions, buying a bus ticket, or ordering food in a restaurant. 

Experiential learning is simply ‘learning from experience’ and as my students learned from role-play activities, I learned from reflection.

My initial reflections were basic and I simply wrote down what I did in the lesson and what I observed the students doing. My ability to reflect on the things that I had learned from each lesson and the areas I needed to improve upon was very limited. 

As the weeks went on, I was able to start thinking more critically about the concrete experiences I was having during these role-play activities.

After a few weeks, I was starting to ask questions about how good or bad my lessons were, and why. I had developed a clear systematic approach to my reflections and I would sit down and reflect on the session immediately after it had finished

I was asking myself questions like: what do I need to know in order to teach this effectively? Will the children have similar experiences to mine? How can I get my ideas and the teaching across in a succinct way? Why did this happen?

I suddenly realized that these kind of questions could also be used to reflect more deeply and critically on areas in my personal life, too. Critical reflection of my teaching style had inadvertently led to improvement in my well-being. 

I ended up spending 3 years in South Korea where I developed a love for teaching, made friends for life and met my beautiful wife. Daehan Minguk.