I’ve Got a Plan!

Admittedly, I’ve written this blog drawing plenty of comparisons with what I grew up with in the Philippines. While it is true that both home and there share much of the same things, what they both differ in a lot of things are their goals in teaching foreign language. It was a difficult adjustment to be sure, but nothing too much to handle.

Was That It?: Curriculum Impressions

By the second week of my stay in Ban Mhaekeng, I feel like I was ready to finally start drafting my very own teaching plan. But before I get ahead of myself, I needed to read through the ever-dreaded curriculum guide.

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Yeah, we might wanna cross out 'dreaded'... Whenever I hear the phrase curriculum guide, an image of a towering stack of barely organized, printed paper comes to mind. It’s something that I’ve always tried to avoid but never really could. Now imagine my face when I saw that the entire curriculum guide that I had to follow was only twenty-eight pages long. It’s not even a bad twenty-eight pager; it wasn’t compressed or anything. It didn’t have wonky font sizes; the darned curriculum was just that short. For once, I can finally say to myself that I’ve managed to read through a curriculum guide from start to finish without having to doze off in between.

        Reading through the curriculum, it was clear what the Ministry of Education wanted out of its graduates. The goals underlined throughout the guide revolved around critical reading and fundamentals of understanding the English language. Being the curious George that I am, I also went ahead and asked Teacher Jin about it, and my suspicions were proven true. Teacher Jin explained that English was taught in Thai classrooms simply as a means to help students take standardized tests – a means to an end if you will. Most of the learning competencies in the guide were centered around text interpretation, information exchange, and cultural comparisons.

Seriously Though, I’ve Got A Plan…

Having learned much from the curriculum read-through of mine, it was now time to draft a teaching plan. Naturally, the first step would be choosing a topic to teach. To make my life a bit easier, I decided to ask Teacher Aom for her guidance so I could make up my mind. Eventually, we settled on a familiar topic – past perfect tense.

Given that I was in a different country, with a totally different system for writing teaching plans, I had asked Teacher Jin if she could show me the ins and outs of writing one. To my surprise, Thai teaching plans were just about the same as the ones that I used to make back home, which made the writing process just a tad bit easier.

All in all, teaching plans had about three sections: the overview (including the learning standards, objectives, indicators, and alignment details), the instruction proper (covering presentation and discussion), and assessment (covering the learning activities and assessment strategies).

After gathering my materials and ideas, it was now time to decide on what activities I wanted to include. Given that Thai classrooms weren’t that used to English instruction, I generally stayed away from activities with convoluted instructions. I had also made it a point to not use individual activities, just so my students didn’t feel pressured while conducting our activities.

For my introductory activity, I decided on something familiar and enjoyable at the same time, a pass-the-box type of game if you will. In this activity, learners would pass around an ornament, and whenever music played, they had to pass it around their immediate seatmate. The last to touch the ornament gets to choose a dare that they have to do in the class.

Now for my instruction proper, I decided to keep it simple and play more along the familiarity of students, so I kind of just did what other teachers did in the department. A digital slideshow presentation, but I made it a point to also emphasize reading activities in my own, just to get my learners familiarized with my buzz words.

Last but not least, I had to decide on what activity I wanted my students to do after the instruction. I had thought at first to do the same paper-based worksheets like the other teachers in the department. Admittedly, it would’ve made the practicum much easier to do, but I ultimately decided against it. Instead, I looked into using collaborative activities, just so my students didn’t feel pressured or anything to excel in the activity. A group-based quiz bee is what I decided to go through with.

Putting the teaching plan together after all these was just a walk in the park. Piecing together the standards, objectives, and indicators was pretty simple because I didn’t really have to come up with a lot of them, and just needed to consult the guide. Then I wrote the mechanics of the introductory activity, the rules, and whatnot, straightened out the flow of the instruction, then to top it all off formulated questions for the quiz bee. A few days later, and will you look at that, I have a plan!

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