OBSERVATION DAYS

According to Saowapon's journal about "Education Reform and E-Learning in Thailand", it is written that Thai teachers would like to be able adapt to change so that they could move Thailand in the direction of "student centered" learning. I could see the realization of its by the learning sources Chiengraknoi has.

Mathematics room at Chiengraknoi has a computer connected to projector and internet. It even has interactive projector with finger touch sensor. Not only in mathematics room, the facilities are also available for the other subjects' rooms, even the elementary ones! It surprised me that Thai's public school has such technology which is also available in private school.

There are computer, LDC projector, and fingertouched screen

Based on my observation, learning materials in Chiengraknoi is only from books. In mathematics class, the facilities served to support student’s learning are not used. What should be improved by Thailand in my perspective is its human resources. I had been observing Chiengraknoi's both english and mathematics class for a full week and what I found was that only English class used the facilities to teach (at least for the powerpoint, adobe, and youtube, though). Not even a single teacher in mathematics did. I'm not sure if the teachers didn't know about ICT based learning or there was another reason, but I knew there was no applications for mathematics. I would like to install my application there but the version wasn't match at all.

What is new about teaching in Thai is that the teacher is free to used what method, model, and approach to teach. They are not tied to any learning methods Indonesian always carry about. Thai’s lesson plan is even simpler than Indonesian. They only focus on practice for the day. When I asked a student teacher teaching at Chiengraknoi how can lesson plan can be this simple, she said that teaching a specific topic in one grade with so many section means that we have to prepare so many “tricks” to control the students. Section 1 might be okay with traditional method, but Section 2 might be familiar with contextual learning while Section 3 could be controlled by military system. By not adding what method we teach the students, the teacher can only adjust what method to used in every section or even doing research by combining some methods.

According to Thai’s version of lesson plan, the procedure of teaching was divided by five steps : warm up, presentation, practice, production, and wrap up. Warm up is an activity when the teacher introduces a topic the student are going to learn about. Presentation is time for the teacher to explain about the topic along with the spontaneous questions and discussion. Practice is given by the teacher and done by the students in order to know how far is the understanding of the students’ about the topic. Production is time for the teacher to evaluate every activity of student as result. Wrap up is done at the end of activity as an opportunity for teacher to give conclusion and reinforcement. Time allocation given to teach a subject in one class is only 60 minutes per day. It is important for the teacher to be able to allocate the time as maximum as they can. The way of teacher organizes class’ activity depends on curriculum.