After observing my co-teachers and how they teach for a bit, I finally agreed to make my way to the front of the classroom and work alongside them this week. But I didn’t get started teaching just yet. First, we needed to set some agreements for the classroom.
Since my job is to help develop Thai teachers and to show them student-centered methodologies, I figured this was a good place to start showing them what student-centered looks like. I told them that we would have the students set the rules for the classroom and we would do that by having a discussion and asking them opened ended questions about what a good student does and what a good teacher does. After that, we would have the students think of their own consequences for breaking the agreements.
It was really a great exercise for everyone involved. I got an idea of what the students expect the classrooms in Thailand to look and feel like (and maybe that a lot of the classrooms fall short of that expectation), and my co-teachers had a chance to see that the students are very capable of thinking of things on their own. For the students, I think it was their first chance to try thinking critically.
There were certainly some rough patches, and not all the classes met this week so there are still some more classes that need to go through this process. When I told the students that my only real expectation for the classroom was that they try to speak English only, it was often met with a lot of resistance. But, I explained to them that I know how difficult it is for them to speak English because when I am out in the community I have to try to speak Thai only (and I have the added difficulty that people in my community often don’t really speak Thai, they speak a different dialect).
When I explained that to them, they were a lot more willing to try. Not to mention that often when I first posed the questions to the students, there were no answers. Students in Thailand are not used to being asked opened-ended questions that require thinking instead of just a canned correct response. But once they saw that I would write every answer on the board and that there were no wrong answers to the questions, the ideas started flowing more freely. It was still hard at times, but it got better.
Some of the choice agreements for the students helping the teacher carry things, not making loud noises in the classroom and not running away from the classroom when the teacher is gone. One of my favorite teacher agreements is that good teachers don’t kill the students. I agreed to that. Some of the consequences got pretty creative: pick up 100 piece of garbage and jump 50 times, cleaning the bathrooms for a week, 3 one-handed push-ups.
For classes that I saw twice during the week, the second class was spent with me taking their pictures, writing down their names and having them pick out an English name. They really loved picking out an English name and I think it will be a great tool to teach them phonics. I’m excited.
Check out some of these hooligans!
