Let’s do it!

By: Andari Amalia S. (10th August 2018)

The next day after we celebrated Mother’s Day, we came to school as usual to continue our obsevation. We saw students did their flag ceremony in every morning, at 7:50 am. This time, we wanted to focus on observing and looked at the examples of lesson plan from our teachers. Here are some points that we gathered after we observed the school:

1. School Profile

Tawarawadee School is a private high school that is located in Nakhon Pathom City, Thailand. This school has six grades that is from Mattayom 1 to Mattayom 6. Mattayom 1 means for year 7, Mattayom 4 means for year 10. They have separated building for their elementary school level. The population of this school is not much, as only around 300 students are present from all the mattayoms (1-6), and the school has very strong culture that is influenced by Budhhism.

2. Academic Support System

Tawarawadee school provides educational services and resources to help students in accelerating their learning progress, meeting their learning standards so that they can succeed in school. For mattayom 5 and 6, students are already asked for their future planning course, and it is a teachers’ job to help them. One of ways to do that is from creating events for students and collaborating together with the available universities so that they can find out themselves about what they want to do in the future. For mattayom 6, they all have extra lessons available which it can help them to practice doing exercises and exams.

3. Teaching System

From the result of the observation, all teachers are asked to give materials according to the curriculum. For every subjects, they apply different methods in teaching. For example, science classes focus more on discussion and projects, while other subjects like English still focuses on lecture and group working. For English subject, they divided the course into to units, they are English for Daily Life and English for Analysis. The way they divided the course might not be similar to other schools.

4. Materials and Other Learning Sources

The given materials for students are usually in the form of texts or exercises that could be obtained from online or the available textbooks, and it depends on what topics we are going to teach. They prefer to use materials from specific website, such as http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/, and we can find textbooks from the school library. The school library is well-organized and it has a lot of qualified books we can use for students.

5. Measurement and Evaluation System

The method used to measure students’ competence are based from the criteria of their cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. They also give different types of test to evaluate students, such as summative test, progress tests like short quizes, and worksheet. Being active students in the class also adds some extra points to students.

6. Curriculum

The curriculum that Thailand uses for their educucation is called ‘The Basic Core Curriculum 2008.’ The vision of this curriculum is to aim at enhancing capacity of all learners, who constitute the major force of the country, so as to attain balanced development in all respects, including physical strength, knowledge and morality. It is also stated that the learner-centred approach is therefore strongly advocated, based on the conviction that all are capable of learning and self-development to their highest potentiality.

7. Teaching Plan

It is a must for all teachers, including training teachers to create proper lesson plans before the teaching process starts. Teachers have to follow all the important procedures in creating the lesson plan following the valid curriculum, and receive the approvement from the coordinating teachers and supervisors before the submission.