In the belief that training sessions offered Thai teachers in the past did not get to the root of their problems or reveal their true needs - a country-wide project has been launched to provide training for teachers facing different challenges and objectives.
Authorities recognise this will be a huge three-year project needing large numbers of teachers and administrators to see it to completion.
Despite the daunting the task of passing on good teaching techniques to so many teachers, 25 universities, led by Chulalongkorn University (CU) have offered to take part in workshop training using their educational expertise and experience.
Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec)'s Bureau of Personnel Administration Development and Legal Affairs director Pitsanu Tulasuk said in the past the bureau had been given only a Bt200 million annual budget to develop 417,000 school teachers nationwide.
"The budget was small and the bureau could not provide training sessions covering every teacher. Each training session would be short too. As a result, training could not help teachers deal with the varied problems they faced or their needs in the different contexts of their schools."
"When a problem was reported from an Obec educational service zone office, Obec designed and organised training for schools in the educational service zone office without understanding the context. Moreover some schools in the same zone had different problems, but their teachers had to attend the same training," Pitsanu said, explaining why the training did not help develop teachers.
In order to find out what teachers need, the problems they face and what their weak points are, more than 450,000 school teachers and executives of educational service zone offices will do professional competency tests, in which the results will reflect their real needs and problems, according to Obec.
The first group to do the tests scheduled in the second week of February will be lower secondary school teachers who teach science and math.
CU's Faculty of Education dean Sirichai Kanjanawasee said 15 per cent of these educational personnel would be selected to participate in workshop training by the 25 universities. "We hope they will be 'master teachers' helping us build up a network and guide other teachers with lower competencies."
"We'll focus on training them with good teaching techniques rather than contents. They will learn best practices from successful schools so they will get new ideas to develop their teaching," said Sirichai, adding he hoped the trained teachers could encourage students to seek knowledge from different sources inside and outside classrooms, knowing how to learn and think analytically and critically.
Sirichai said after training, each would be required to do post-tests to assess the training. In addition, he recommended Obec let other organisations, for instance the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment, do the external assessment.
Teachers chosen to act as master teachers will be considered for awards of higher academic standing or scholarships to study overseas.
Both organisations accepted that running this nation-scale training project would be hard because they had to train several hundreds of thousands of educational personnel before organising training sessions during school long vacations.
"The universities need to start training by March, but I have yet to sign a contract with Obec, which required the new education minister's agreement. The process is slow. If Obec is ready to sign the contract, we can immediately move. We're now designing curriculum for the training, producing instructional media and the training guides," Sirichai said.
However, 70 per cent or Bt966 million out of the total budget for 185 educational service zone offices has already been transferred to the offices, according Obec.
With the limited budget, Sirichai said, the universities could provide five-day training for teachers and nine-day training for school and educational service zone office executives. He wanted to train each of them for 15 days.
Prayoon Boonsit, from Kungcharoenpittayakhom School in Udon Thani, a teacher to be trained, recommended Obec allow teachers activities and to share ideas with other teachers during workshop training, saying "Just listening to trainers without practising is boring, so they will not have a new idea."
Prayoon said training held by several universities near his province was effective and he believed the workshop training by 25 universities under this project would be too.
He recommended training during school vacations because many small primary schools would need to leave their students to join training during school open periods, especially in August and September when educational service zone offices rushed to spend their annual training budget before close of the fiscal year.
