Last weekend, Asian University welcomed a group of 19 Philippine, one Irish and 16 U.S. teachers and 5 Thai observers from the Anuban Chonburi School for a teacher-training weekend. The teachers arrived Saturday morning early and left Sunday late afternoon after a successful and intense weekend with a variety of different lectures, workshops, and seminars focusing on the ‘how’ of education, rather than the ‘what’.
At Anuban Chonburi School, 176 Thai and 36 foreign teachers take care of 3,311 kindergarten and primary school students. Three of the foreign teachers teach in Chinese language, the others in English.
The teachers started into the weekend with a review of their dialectic skills, thus providing them with an individual starting point for the workshops, lectures and seminars to follow.
A happy farewell after a most intense teacher-training seminar weekend.
On Sunday morning, David Goldsack, the Principal of Rayong English Programme School (REPS) provided a guest lecture on the current state of Thai education, followed by a workshop on Sunday afternoon by a visiting delegation from Fontys University of Applied Science, The Netherlands. John van Lare and John Scholtes facilitated a dynamic workshop assisted by four teacher trainees, Annique, Lisanne, Dennis and Roy from the Fontys Teacher Training Academy.
In this workshop, the participants evaluated a gallery of instructional techniques and put them into a hierarchy after their retention rate; i.e., how students remember what they learned in class. Research has shown that instructional techniques should change in the classroom every 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the age of the students in order to keep their attention and concentration on a high level.
This high-end education seminar was developed and led by Freek Olaf de Groot, Programme Leader Master of Education programme in TESOL, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Asian University, and observed by several senior faculty of Asian University and by five Thai observers from Anuban Chonburi School who all agreed with the participants on the high quality of the seminar.
