I don't know of any teachers who have performed public confessions. I know some teachers who have big group interviews, but I don't know about confessions. As to Monks and whether they have a certain tradition, whether it's monthly or every two weeks or whatever it is, they do have a certain tradition of apologizing to each other, forgiving each other. I'm not sure it's a confession as we normally think of confessions in English and the Christian faith.
My general understanding is, that they would come together, and it doesn't necessarily have to be public at all, two monks can do it in a private place, as far as I understand. And one monk would simply say to the other, "If I have done anything unmindful with my actions, speech and thoughts, would you please forgive me?" - And the other monk says, "I forgive you", and then would apologize in a similar fashion. They don't have to say anything specific they did wrong, it's a tradition to simply ask for forgiveness if they have done anything wrong and then extend it to the other person for anything that person did unmindfully. As to the benefit of confessing things you've done wrong, that could be another issue in itself.
It would have been nice if Bill Clinton had made a confession publicly in 1999 or 2000 or whenever it was, regarding his sexual matter. It would have been nice for him to have done it publicly instead of lying for 4 months and then finally kind of admitting it, but never really admitting it. He made a big fool of himself. He was actually a pretty good president, but that will be on his record forever. Not so much the affair he had with that girl, but the fact that he lied for four months or however long it was, and then hedging around before making an actual apology. That was more his problem, not so much having the affair. So a public confession may be beneficial at times, butdepending on the situation, it may not be proper every time you do something wrong.
Christianity uses it, some parts of Christianity, right, you stick your confession in a little box, give it to the priest and you tell him what you did wrong that week, and he says, "you're forgiven" or whatever. I've never done that so I don't know it perfectly. Now privately, with your good friends, maybe you did something wrong and you want to apologize to them, you want to confess you did something wrong. That's not always the right thing to do either. It's just not a black and white issue. If they know you did something wrong to them, apologizing, confessing, saying you're sorry, that's a great thing to do, if they know it. Now if they don't know it and it wasn't that important, and you bring it up later and then they get angry at you and all sorts of extra problems come because they're finding out about it, maybe it would have been better never to have confessed it to them.
This is not in any way a black and white situation, it's something we need to look at individually. For probably all of us here, we did something as a kid which wasn't very wise and nobody found out about it. Stole a candy bar, whatever. We did this way back, say 50 years, 30 years, 20 years ago, and nobody knew about it. And maybe it was something involving our parents, maybe we took money out of their wallet. Now 20 years later, to go and confess it to our parents may not be a wise thing to do. It would create pain to them today. We've already created some pain before, maybe they opened their wallet and there was no money in it. And they were upset, "Where did my money go?", so they already experienced pain back then. If they find out it was you who took the money, you give them more pain. So sometimes rather than confessing at all, put some money in their wallet and don't say anything about it. You are making up for it, but not actually confessing or expressing an apology verbally because that could produce a bigger problem, yet taking responsibility for it now and expressing it in a good action.
The whole issue of confessing, apologizing, is not black and white. In the moment though, yes, it's black and white. Say you take some money out of their wallet and they see you, please, apologize as quickly as you can and never do it again. So time wise, often it affects whether you confess outwardly, publicly, whether it's the right person or not. Now let's say you can't apologize to the right person, there's an expression in English "getting it off your chest". Sometimes a good friend is for that, a priest is for that, to get it off your chest, to at least confess it to somebody so you don't feel so terrible because you are holding it inside. Perhaps that's beneficial at times. But it had better be somebody you trust, very well, otherwise that could backfire on you, too.