With the new teaching methodology Archarn Raweewan Pumut often finds herself in the role of a consultant. This has reduced her in-class burden, but has increased the time she spends on lesson planning and student assessment. |
Child-centred learning as mandated by the National Education Act of 1999 has become a controversial issue in Thailand. Few of its critics, however, appear to have a solid grasp of what this approach really involves. In fact, it is neither mysterious nor insidious as Archarn Terry’s visit to a Lampang secondary school clearly illustrates
It was a strange-looking process and I asked my hosts for more details. They, in turn, called on Archarn Sanit to come over and explain. Without hesitation, he selected a student to do the job for him.
 A student takes centre stage answering questions about mushroom growing from Khelangnakorn School director Juree Sroypett. |
The student was surprised, but not flustered and he fielded our questions without difficulty. With a little coaching from school director Juree Sroypett, he was also able to calculate the costs of production – both obvious and hidden – as well as the profit the crop would likely fetch when it reached the market.
This is a very simple example of the child-centred learning we have heard so much about lately. It is neither mysterious nor insidious. The teacher had not abandoned his class and the student was not asked to perform a task for which he was ill prepared. Archarn Sanit had merely recognised a situation where a student could take centre stage and he stepped aside and let him do it.
The pilot programmeThis view of the student as more than a passive receptacle of information is shared by many teachers at Khelangnakorn, a government secondary school of 2500 students located just outside the northern city of Lampang. Their positive attitude toward child-centred learning is clearly one of the reasons that the school was selected with 161 other schools countrywide to pilot the new reform curriculum.
Actually, explains Archarn Juree, the old curriculum is still in place and the teachers are using learner-centred techniques to teach that content. At the same time, the administration, faculty and local school board – which plays a very active role at Khelangnakorn – are busy finalising their own localised version of the reform curriculum which will be introduced in the next school term which opens in May.
The other pilot schools are keeping to the same schedule. The new term will also see about 1,000 other schools adopting the new curriculum. It will be a gradual process, however. The new curriculum will initially be confined to the first and fourth years at both the primary and secondary levels.
Changing classroom rolesThroughout the period of experimentation, the teachers and administrators from the participant schools have attended numerous meetings and workshops to share ideas and to develop the curriculum.
It was at one such session in Bangkok that I first meet Archarn Juree. She is a long-time advocate of learner-centred education, having first realised the importance of independent study at the university when she made the transition from an undergraduate major in mathematics to a masters programme in political science.
Archarn Juree said she was first able to implement a learn-centred approach on the secondary level when she became the principal at a school in Amphoe Hang Chat. As soon as she moved to Khelangnakorn, she began to "sell" the idea among the faculty there.
She said she was helped enormously by the passage of National Education Act of 1999 which mandated sweeping reforms in the learning process. Teachers, she said, quickly realised that change was coming and they needed to adapt their teaching styles. From my January 15 visit to Khelangnakorn, it was clear that many of the teachers had indeed come a long way in doing so.
My first class of the morning was a Mattayom 6 (secondary school, final year) social studies class focusing on medicinal herbs, part of the community wisdom section of the course. The students were organised in groups and were examining a wide variety of medicinal herbs grown at the school and the local community. To help them, they each had several detailed references.
 Chalk-and-talk is no longer the method of choice for social studies teacher Manat Intanon. |
Teacher, Archarn Manat Intanon, told me he had largely abandoned the chalk-and-talk approach he had formally used with this section of the course. Instead, he acted more as a lesson planner and consultant – a very active consultant, I might add.
Archarn Manat had advance warning I was coming, but, as we were running a bit late, the rest of the morning was improvised. An M5 Thai-language class looked interesting and I received the teacher’s permission to come inside and observe.
The students were sitting in small groups throughout the room with Thai-language newspapers spread out in front of them. The teacher, Archarn Worawan Maneechai, was standing next to her desk where students periodically gathered to ask her questions.
 In this M5 language class, students are doing their own text analysis using popular newspapers. The students standing at the right of the picture are going to Archarn Worawan Maneechai for consultation. |
I asked three girls sitting near me what they were doing. They said that they were finding and analysing examples of official and unofficial announcements. The official announcements, they told me, were those issued by government agencies. These, they said, tended to be very formulaic with the content organised according to a fixed pattern. The unofficial announcements, on the other hand, seemed to the girls to be far less consistent in form and content.
I asked Archarn Worawan whether this type of learning and teaching was something new. She answered that while the subject had always been part of the curriculum, she, like Archarn Manat, had previously taught it at the blackboard.
Interestingly, she also said that students found the content easier to absorb when they did the analysis themselves. Formerly, many students were unable to keep up with her chalk-and-talk approach.
Leaving the Thai class, I ran into a group of M4 students gathering for another Thai-language class which was held in several outdoor work areas, each shaded with a thatched roof. Again, the students quickly separated into groups where they proceeded to discuss reading material that each had chosen individually.
Their teacher, Archarn Raweewan Pumut, circulated from group to group, making suggestions as needed. She explained that the students had been assigned to find readings that they found interesting and useful. They were then supposed to consider in what way the reading could be beneficial to their lives. In addition, they were asked to determine the writer’s point of view and his or her purpose. Finally, the students were asked to give their opinion of their chosen reading and what impressed them about it.
In this stage of the lesson – which had obviously taken several periods to reach – they were sharing their ideas about their articles. They were following what looked like a standard teacher-produced form. I found out from Archarn Raweewan, however, that, under her guidance, the students themselves had produced the form.
Thus, in all three cases described above, students at Khelangnakorn were increasingly being given opportunities to take a more active role in the learning process. Their teachers, on the other hand, were taking a more consultative role.
During class time, that is. Outside of class was a different story altogether. This type of teaching, they said, was more demanding in terms of lesson preparation and assessment.
 Four key members of the local school board. From left: Assistant School Director Amnuay Timcharus, Director Juree Sroypett, former Director Boonrat Rochanasak and Board Chairman Wichai Promsilpa. In the background, you can see that school officials have worked hard to preserve the many varieties of plants in what thirty years ago was land owned by the Forestry Department. |
Integration and decentralisation
Archarn Juree has taken curricular reform far beyond the individual classroom. Over the past two years, she led her school’s efforts to fully integrate its curriculum.
Using a thematic approach, the school has taken full advantage of its rural environment, to implement an elaborate programme based on the local rice culture.
Last August, for example, the programme began with the planting of the rice crop according to age-old community traditions. It culminated in December with a ceremonial rice harvest with many local and national dignitaries in attendance (see box).
Throughout this period, each academic department designed tasks to help bring the ancient rice culture alive for the students. In the sciences, for example, classes focused on the soil composition conducive to rice cultivation. Thai language classes looked at the original equipment used by the farmers. English classes studied the language of advertising and were active in promoting the festivities among foreign tourists.
Next, with the enthusiastic support of the school board, there are plans to extend this portion of the curriculum to an in-depth study of the province of Lampang. At lunch, I spoke with two of the senior members of the board about why the proposed course of study was needed.
Board chairman Wichai Promsilpa, a former senator, was particularly concerned that Khelangnakorn students had very little knowledge of their home province. Lampang has a thriving ceramics industry, for example, but few students had visited a factory to see the process, he said.
Boonrat Rochanasak, a former school director, said the students also lacked knowledge of Lampang history. Indeed, few knew much about the history of their own school, a very interesting story in itself. Archarn Boonrat should know. She helped establish the school in 1974 when it was little more than a large plot of wooded land obtained from the Forestry Department.
Significantly, the establishment of local school boards is a very new phenomenon in Thai education, a direct result of the National Education Act. Archarn Juree is clearly delighted that her board is supportive. In fact, she says, meaningful reform would be impossible without such support.
As you move higher up the ladder in the Thai educational system, things do not appear to be progressing quite as smoothly. Indeed, unlike the progress in curriculum design and implementation, bureaucratic reform appears to be lagging, with affected ministries and departments jealously guarding their present powers.
But the clock is ticking. Current law sets September 20th of this year as the deadline for passage of the supporting laws required by the constitution. This means, among other things, the establishment of a single ministry of education, religion and culture. The next seven months promise to be interesting.
Note: A special thanks to school director Archarn Juree Sroypett and Archarn Supaporn Jansiriyotin for helping to make my visit such a productive one.
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Focus on rice Curriculum integration and community involvement were key elements in Khelangnakorn School’s months-long programme focusing on the local rice culture.
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Read about the "teacher who doesn't speak".
terryfrd@ksc15.th.com |
The programme officially began with the rice planting festivities on August 9, 2001, but this had been preceded by many weeks of planning and course design.
The rice harvest festivities on December 2 drew many local and national dignitaries. That’s Dr Kasama Varavarn na Ayudhaya in the middle and to her right is M.R. Thanadsri Svasli who produced two Channel 5 programmes on Khelangnakorn. To her left (holding the harvested rice) is Lampang Governor (CEO) Peera Manatad. Dr Kasama Varavarn na Ayudhaya, Director General, General Education Department.