Peace Corps Pre-Service Training: Practicum

As part of the training for the Teacher Collaboration and Community Service program, we get to spend eight days over two weeks working with a real, live Thai teacher and teach real, live Thai students in a real, live Thai school. I think that this is especially exciting after lesson planning for imaginary students.

I found out that I would be working with the Pratom 2 (second grade equivalent) teacher at Wat Bang Krang School, where I have been having my language classes. I could tell that she was really excited to work with me. (It was just after we prepared our first lesson plan that I had my unfortunate incident.)

Everyday I would come into the classroom after eating lunch to a chorus of a slowly chanted, “Good af-ter-noooooooon tea-cher.” To which I would respond, “Good afternoon, class! How are you today?” The response would once again be a slowly chanted, “I’m fine, thank you.” Super cute.

I taught a variety of subjects, from body parts to trying to teach sentences and questions to scaling back to just colors and days of the week and animals. There were definitely some challenges that came up in practicum that I am glad to be aware of, so that I can be intentional in mitigating those issues once I am at site. I think working with a class from the beginning of the year will allow me the opportunity to have high expectations for my students and to maintain some continuity with my lessons. Also, I feel like I established a pretty cursory relationship with the students and I’m looking forward to having those relationships with my students at site and in a more meaningful way. I also hope to be able to work more with my co-teacher and empower them more feel more comfortable using teaching techniques that they are not familiar with.

My co-teacher’s assistant took some pictures of me teaching, which I will hopefully be able to get copies of to post. If the goal is to get a feel of what a Thai classroom is like, I feel like that goal has been achieved and I am really looking forward to being at a school full time.