Just before we left for our site visit, we started to plan for a Teacher Training camp that we would put on once we returned to Suphan Buri. To say we are hitting training at a whirlwind pace at this point is almost an understatement.
So before we left, we settled on the theme of Fun and Games. After our practicum and hearing repeatedly about how Thai education is a lot of memorization and recitation, we figured this could be a neat way to show that education can be more engaging than that. We spilt up into 5 groups: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing and Materials creation. Then we set about coming up with games to play with teachers, and to convey that the games we were playing were adaptable to any kind of lesson plan in any subject even.
I was a part of the Listening group. Once we sat down, we tried to figure out what direction we wanted to go in. Traditionally listening instruction is something along the lines of gap fills, where the learners are given a script with some of the words or phrases missing and then they must listen to a recording and fill in the gaps based on their listening. Which is kind of boring.
We figured that there are other components to listening, especially components that are not typically explored in Thai education, such as phonics. So we decided to focus on listening to the ending sounds of words, since those are especially hard for Thai speakers (because in Thai language the ending sound is usually dropped or swallowed).
We played Simon Says, had the learners practice saying ending sounds, preference corners (where we put up the ending sounds around the room and told certain groups to go to certain corners), the slap game (the ending sounds on the board, two teams, say a word and the team members slap the sound they hear) and telephone.
We made sure to mention at each point that they could use these games with more than just sounds, like vocabulary. The teachers all seemed to have a really good time with us, and when talking to my fellow trainees, they seemed to enjoy themselves in all the sessions.
I really liked this training camp and I feel like this could potentially have more of an impact that the camp with the students. It will be hard to tell, since we won’t be doing any follow up and this came at the end of the school year for them, but I feel pretty positive about it.