Note: an abridged version of this article was originally published by The Brief, Magazine of the British Chamber of Commerce, December 2008.All photos are by Jon, except for the one of Khru Mai and her P2 class of 2005, showing an early Team English effort, and the publicity shot from My Fair Lady © Warner Bros. Pictures.
There are few people who get up in the morning and can't wait to get started on their day. Whose day consists of getting hugs from beaming 6-year-olds, between complex, fascinating work developing both human and material resources, bringing into play almost every skill they have acquired over decades. Whose employer gives timely advice and encouragement, yet is trusting, and more patient about outcomes than the employee. Who, in short, has the best job in the world!
Well, I am here to tell you that I am one of those rare and insanely lucky people. My employer is the Teacher Plus Foundation, and I am the Senior Project Director of the Centre for Learning Skills Development, based at Ban Chamkho School in Khao Chamao District. And if you are bored of my gushing about my employer and my job, you had better turn to another article now, because I'm just getting started.
As well as being a great employer, the Teacher Plus Foundation is visionary. It was built on the realisation of its founder, K. Napaporn Landy, that, while there has been genuine improvement recently to the “hardware” of education (buildings, computers, basketball courts), the “software” (the teachers) have been largely neglected. That is understandable. If you build a library, or furnish a computer lab, you have immediate and tangible evidence of your generosity and effort. Working to develop teachers takes a lot longer, and, frankly, you may never know in your lifetime if the effort was worthwhile. But K. Napaporn and the rest of us at Teacher Plus are in it for the long haul.
My involvement with the foundation actually goes back to 2003, although I only started to work here full-time in 2005. Previously, I had been Head of Studies at the Swinburne campus in Laem Chabang. This will possibly sound a lot unkinder than it is intended, but at Swinburne, I learned a lot about how not to go about education reform. I was heavily involved in an initiative by the Chancelry to set up a multi-award framework that would have taken students through Diploma, Associate Degree, Bachelor Degree, Post Graduate Diploma, and Masters Degree, smoothly changing the style of education to suit each stage of the program, while giving opportunities for students to take time off to get experience of the “real world”, rather than getting their education “over and done with”, graduating with a Masters Degree but no life experience.I remember one of the most strident critics of that project, an engineering lecturer by the name of Dr. David Booth, describing it as “audacious and elegant”. Now, those of you who know engineers will know that they do not use the word “elegant” lightly. Elegant is, for an engineer, about the highest compliment possible. But David went on to point out, very eloquently, the folly in how we were going about things. The Chancelry was trying to ram this into the faculties from above. Not only did that immediately make people negative and defensive, it meant that the framework had many serious flaws that could have been averted if we had only involved the university community at a much earlier stage in development.
So, to cut a long story short, I was determined, from the beginning, to make my work with Teacher Plus a grass-roots project. Although grass-roots projects are more difficult to get going, I do believe they have a much better chance of success. Over the last three years, I have seen several worthy initiatives from the Ministry of Education (MoE) fail to take hold for very similar reasons to what I experienced with Swinburne.
Now getting a grass-roots movement going in Australia or the UK is a very different matter to Thailand. In Australia, in particular, we had grass-roots projects taking form while the first colonists were still on the ships – they generally involved escaping from custody. Thais are much more accepting of hierarchy, and certainly less inclined to tell a more “senior” person if they think something is a bad idea.
I suppose I dealt with this largely by gravitating towards those teachers that were most willing to engage with the process. Everywhere I went, I was warmly welcomed, and treated to that legendary rural Thai hospitality. However, for many of the teachers, it was clear that their main interest in my being there was to give their students some contact with a friendly farang, so that they would not be gripped with the same terror of foreigners that besets so many middle-aged rural Thais. While this is a worthy objective in itself, and one that any foreigner could have a lot of fun devoting their time to, it did not fit with my foundation's objectives. Certainly not if, as I began to realise, the teachers had no intention of changing the teaching methods that they used themselves.At the same time, K. Napaporn was strongly advising me to focus my time and energy on a single school. That was sound advice. Even if I tried focussing solely on those teachers who were interested in developing themselves, by the time I got around the whole circuit, no one would get much help.
I eventually selected Ban Chamkho School, a small “Expanded Opportunity” school in Khao Chamao district. “Expanded Opportunity” means that what was originally a prathom (primary) school extended their program to give rural students the opportunity to complete their education up to mathayom (secondary level) three. Ban Chamkho also has an anuban (kindergarten) attached.
That suited our purpose well. It meant that we could trial activities and resources with students from 4 to 15 years of age. However, my main reason for selecting BCK was the teachers. Every teacher that I have worked with here is open to new ideas, and courageous enough to try them out for themselves. Some will even tell me if they think something is a bad idea!By coincidence, Ban Chamkho School is also called a “Lab School”, meaning it is part of the government's “One Dream School for Every Amphoe” project. Frankly, for the most part, the “lab” part of the project is achieved simply by changing the sign in front of, for example, the maths classroom to read “Maths Lab”!
But Ban Chamkho School really is the laboratory for Teacher Plus's Centre for Learning Skills Development. We hypothesise, experiment, trial, refine, document, go back to the drawing board with new hypotheses, and so the cycle continues. And we are making progress.
One of the first things we started working on is a system called Team English. This is an organizational and motivational framework, originally created by Assoc. Prof. Maggie MacDonald from Wright State University, and first piloted here in Thailand.
By remaining with the same team over a period of several months, student team-mates develop loyalty to each other. This motivates every member to succeed and to see that the other members succeed as well. Our first experiments with Team English were quite rudimentary. I bought some material in four colours, and one of the teachers got her sister to sew them into headbands.
Revolution! It's hard to describe the effect those headbands had on the students. I remember one of the teachers telling me he used to get the students to put on the headbands even if he didn't have any team activities planned. Their behaviour just transformed as soon as the headbands went on.About six months after that, I happened to bump into Maggie at a TESOL conference. After apologising for spilling her coffee, I started gushing about Team English and how it had transformed our little school. Maggie got very excited. She had been trying to push Team English for years, but very few were taking it up.
Then our delegation from Rayong joined Maggie's workshop to see Team English in action. Suddenly the value of colours and numbers became clear to us. Maggie had nearly 100 participants grouping, regrouping, doing tasks, reporting back, and having lots of fun, all within the space of 50 minutes. When we got back, we started converting the coloured headbands into numbered “uniforms”.
Since then, Maggie has been intimately involved with our project, mostly via email, but she did manage to come to visit us last year, and plans to make one final visit next January before she retires. We have also co-authored one chapter of a book, soon to be published by TESOL International, about strategies for multi-level classrooms.
Another important method we have been working on is Phonics. Any of you who have school-age children or grandchildren back in the UK or other English speaking countries will probably have heard of this term. It was at the heart of one side of what the popular press dubbed the “Reading Wars”. Well the reading wars are, fortunately, over, with Phonics the clear victor, following overwhelming evidence from several trials, particularly one in Clackmannanshire, Scotland.
In Thailand, Phonics is virtually unknown still, with many teachers confusing it with “phonetics”, which they may have encountered at university. Phonics is about the relationship of normal spelling to pronunciation. It is primarily a system to teach children how to read.
Phonics is not new. If you have seen the movie My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins was based on a real life linguist by the name of Henry Sweet, who was one of the early developers of Phonics. In fact, I am one of the lucky generation to have learned reading via Phonics in the early 60's. And most of my generation is literate. Sadly, that situation deteriorated over the next three decades until, by 1998, only 63% of UK students could read to a satisfactory level at the end of Primary school, according to OFSTED.At the Centre, we soon realised that Phonics had even more potential for our students than for their English cousins. We found, not only is it a great system to teach reading, it can also be used to address problems with pronunciation and listening. By relating letters to the sounds of English, students find it much easier to deal with the English pronunciation system. It is certainly a lot easier for them than a teacher saying “Repeat after me,” expecting students to be able to analyse and duplicate the teacher's pronunciation.
And of course the situation in Thai government schools has been much worse still, with some very strange pronunciation being handed down from teacher to student over the generations. One of the first things that both Thai and foreigners visiting Ban Chamkho School notice is the standard of pronunciation.
Team English and Phonics are just two of the strategies we have been working on at the Centre. Everything we do is aimed at the same purpose – to get Thai teachers to move to a teaching style in which students will learn to communicate in English. More broadly speaking, our aim is to get teachers of all subjects to move to a more student-centred approach, and give students the capacity to think, analyse, solve problems and so forth.
To be fair, that is also at the heart of much of what I see the Ministry of Education trying to do recently. And, despite Teacher Plus's relatively minuscule budget and resources, I am confident that we can make a very significant contribution to that effort, well beyond our apparent means – simply because we are a grass-roots movement.Now, we at Teacher Plus are moving to a new era in our own development. A teachers' manual of various activities and techniques has been developed and will be published soon, and available for free download from our website. More materials will follow over the coming months and years, building up a repository of learning and teaching materials for all Thai schools.
More important still, we recently doubled our staff at the Rayong Centre (from me working solo to now having a colleague!), and will add a third trainer/mentor in the new year.
From a tiny project at one small “Expanded Opportunity” school, we are now ready to expand ourselves, beginning to network teachers at 6-12 schools in this area. And we have identified many teachers who are ready, willing and able to at least try what we have to offer. Once we have a community of progressive teachers here, we hope to expand into other areas, eventually building a network of mutually supportive educators throughout rural Thailand.
Now can you see why I can't wait to start my day? I really do have the best job in the world – at least for me. Honestly, if I were anyone else, I would envy the hell out of me!
