The new Thai curriculum:
the Canadian way

There is nothing like a good story to enthral young children and instil in them a love of reading.

Will the Thai school system really be able to cope with an activity-based, learner-centred methodology after so many years of the teacher-driven rote approach? Are the new materials adequate? Can individual schools really tailor the Ministry of Education guidelines to the needs of their students, as they are being asked to do?

Interestingly, these concerns are largely absent in a small Thonburi primary school located in the district of Nongkhaem. There, learner-centred teaching has been the standard since the school was founded in 1996. Materials are plentiful and the national curriculum has been adapted in some very innovative ways.

Left to right: LIPS students Donlaya (Bell) Lotongmongkol, Keawkwan (Mint) Phaoenchoke and Chutimon (B) Thongkhao-on, say they prefer learning in English from foreign teachers. The class atmosphere is more relaxed than that of a Thai school, they say and they like the small classes which are capped at 25 students. Bell and B, both P6 students, are in the final year at Lertlah and they are looking to continue their studies at a local international school or, in Bell’s case, possibly in New Zealand.

Of course, Lertlah International Programme School (LIPS) is not quite your typical Thai school. For starters, the academic staff is largely Canadian. And, with the exception of the Thai language courses, the curriculum is delivered in English. It covers the topics required by the Ministry of Education, but at the same time it draws heavily on the highly respected curriculum developed in the Canadian province of Manitoba.

LIPS is the brainchild of Archarn Seri Parndejpong. During an exchange visit to Manitoba in the 1990s, he was impressed with the French immersion and bi-lingual English-French programmes he saw there and felt there was scope for similar schools in Thailand.

The result was the establishment of Lertlah, which includes a separate and larger bi-lingual programme as well as LIPS. Recently, the learning post spent a day with the international programme to see what happens when the Thai national curriculum is presented in English.

Archarn Seri stresses that LIPS is an "international programme" not an "international school". That distinction is important to the school’s legal status as a private school under the Ministry of Education (MOE) within the national system of education.

Fortunately, the Thai curriculum, particularly in its revised state, is quite flexible. "One of the best things about the new curriculum is that the school is free to create our own curriculum," Archarn Seri explains. "Seventy percent of the topics come from the mainstream MOE curriculum and 30 percent from our own initiative."

Principal Evelyn Karpik is quite positive about the reformed curriculum.

School principal Evelyn Karpik is quite pleased with the revised curriculum. "I think the Thais are going in the right direction," she says.

"I think they’re on the right road to developing a more global type of curriculum. And that’s important. Certainly, the skills they’re teaching are quite adequate. They have a very good science programme," Karpik observes.

"Their social studies programme is mostly Thai for the first few years, which is great, but then they start branching out. Learning about other countries is very important."

Karpik says the biggest difference between the maths programmes in the two countries is that the Canadian curriculum contains more problem solving. "This is difficult at this stage if they don’t have enough English," she says about the situation here. "But it is also very important. We start at the year one level with problem solving."

A second big difference Karpik has observed is that the Thai curriculum stresses computational skills to a far higher degree than is the case in Canada. "In grade one, for instance, children are expected to add and subtract three-digit numbers with regrouping, whereas in Canada we’re more interested in having the children understand the concept of regrouping," Karpik explains.

Since LIPS is basically an English-language immersion programme, the Thai English curriculum is generally irrelevant. Instead, Karpik explains, they have adopted the Manitoba language arts programme.

"I think it is one of the best in the world. I’m sure close to 100 experts were involved in developing this curriculum. Each grade level has a curriculum with every idea you can think of to teach language arts in an interesting way," Karpik says.

"Alberta has adopted it. Saskatchewan has adopted it. Ontario wants it, so it’s really one of the best language arts curriculums."

In many ways, the revisions in the Thai national curriculum have brought it closer to the Canadian curriculum. One such change, Karpik says, is the adoption of a larger set of subject areas.

"They now have eight or nine subject areas. We’ve always had that (in Canada). So when this new curriculum came in and they said social studies and science, work experience, English, Thai and so forth will be taught separately, I thought, but that’s what we already do," Karpik says.

Integrating topics from different subject areas (buranakarn), an important theme in the reform curriculum, is also standard practice in Canadian education, Karpik says.

"We integrate all the time. So if we’re doing social studies and, say, they’re studying about Malaysia in Prathom 5 (P5), we would find folk tales for them about Malaysia. We would, of course, have the geography and the history of Malaysia. We would maybe do some mapping, graphing and we might incorporate some math into that as well as the weather. So we would try to integrate as many subject areas as we can in one topic."

One advantage of teaching social studies in English in the upper levels of elementary school is that English materials are more readily available than Thai materials.

"We use the Internet, but we are also starting to build a very nice social studies resource library," Karpik says. "And I’ve just ordered more books.

School director Seri Parndejpong observes activities in a class.

"So I have texts on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, India, Korea. If I see them at Asia books, I buy them and I say ‘oh Archarn Seri, I bought another book’ and he says ‘No problem.’

"What is difficult to buy in Thailand are books at reading levels that are suitable for K1 to P6. That is one of the biggest problems," Karpik observes.

"But resources are getting much better. Many of the books I’ve ordered on surrounding countries, I’ve had to get from Singapore. But there are more and more good texts on Thailand (produced here). Up until the last two years, I couldn’t find anything. The demand is there now and they’re producing more," she says with obvious satisfaction.

"If there is something missing in the Thai curriculum, we still teach it," says Karpik. "We just ensure that we are covering the Thai curriculum. Then we do our curriculum. We have the flexibility to be able to do that."

The maths curriculum is a good example. Karpik says that while the Thai primary maths curriculum is quite comprehensive, it does not cover some key topics in the Canadian curriculum thoroughly enough, such as ratio, proportion and estimation. At LIPS, they do.

There is also a big difference in the way maths topics are taught. Like their colleagues in Canada, LIPS teachers make extensive use of "manipulatives," physical objects of all shapes and sizes like blocks and cards.

"In our maths programme, especially at the early years, we start with the manipulatives – even at the K1 level," Karpik says.

"They use the blocks for counting quite often, or they can use the blocks for sets. They’ll start talking about sets in K3. ‘Make me three sets of two. How much does that make? Three sets of two are six.’"

That, says Karpik, is the initial stage of multiplication.

Meaningful Venn diagrams are a staple in Carla Matheson’s Prathom one class.

The aim throughout is to help students really understand what they are doing. "By doing things hands-on, they will remember more," says P1/P2 teacher Carla Matheson, one of the LIPS teachers who uses manipulatives most heavily.

Her young students are constantly using a wide variety of manipulatives for counting, basic mathematical calculations, pattern-making, sorting – even Venn diagrams.

For example, working in small groups, students might take two pieces of string to make two circles which overlap in the middle. First they use the circles to sort food pictures according to whether they are healthy or unhealthy. Then, in the overlapping central portion, they might be asked to place all the foods they think are both healthy and delicious.

"This involves thinking and planning," Matheson says. "They’re not doing what Ms Carla told them told them to do, but they’re doing it on their own. They’re problem solving. They’re figuring out how to answer questions on their own."

Finding the common denominator when subtracting three-eighths from one and three-quarters is easy when you use manipulatives such as these. Just place two-eighths on top of one quarter and you see they are equal.

Jared Thorlakson, a P3 teacher, uses manipulatives to help his students understand fractions. Instead of just adding fractions on paper, for example, they work with paper circles which have been divided into fourths, sixths, eighths, tenths and so on.

Thorlakson says that by using manipulatives, students understand more quickly than using traditional methods. Take common denominators, for example. "When you have a quarter and two eighths, you can see it immediately," he says.

"If they understand what’s happening, they can always do the maths (on paper) later. If they don’t understand what’s happening, they can do the math now, perhaps, but they won’t remember it. They won’t be able to grow with it."

It certainly appears that regular Thai schools would have much to gain from using learner-centred techniques similar to the ones employed at Lertlah – especially since they are now delivering basically the same curriculum. The maths manipulatives, for example, are quite inexpensive. Many, in fact, are hand-made.

The English, or "language arts" programme" would seem to be the least applicable to Thai schools given that English is the primary medium of instruction at Lertlah. But even here, many of the approaches are easily transferable.

For example, students are taught to get personally involved in their reading and writing from the earliest levels.

"We have a reading programme that encourages the children to take a book home every day to read to their parents, starting at the K3 level," Karpik says.

"First of all, they’ve practiced the book at school. The teacher has already read the book to the children. They know the book. At the K3/P1 level they may not know how to read each word yet, but they’ll certainly read the pictures. And that is one of the first stages of reading.

"We also encourage writing at the early ages," she says. So in P1, they will start writing right at the beginning of the year. Their writing may just be a picture. And they’ll take it to the teacher and she’ll say ‘Oh, what have you written here?’ And so they’ll explain the story behind the picture."

As is true with many of the other innovative national schools the learning post has visited, the teachers at Lertlah have had relatively little contact with their counterparts in other schools. This seems unfortunate, particularly with so many schools having difficulty adjusting their teaching styles to the demands of the new curriculum.

Hopefully, that will change. The new Thai curriculum has many praiseworthy elements, but the key is in implementation. Here, a bit of Canadian ingenuity might be just what is needed.

| Comments to Terry F. at terryfrd@ksc15.th.com |
|© The Post Publishing Public Co., Ltd.
All rights reserved 2003 |
Last modified: March 3, 2003