Poor Recruiting Hurts Quality Of Teachers

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Poor recruiting hurts quality of teachers

Wannapa Khaopa

The Nation

Critics complain of both shortages, oversupply at many levels

Thailand has up to 660 educational programmes available for producing teachers, but many of these programmes have not responded to the country's demand in terms of quality and quantity.

Assoc Prof Sombat Noparak, president of the Thailand Education Deans Council, said that without a plan that looked into the real demands of agencies that recruit teachers, universities would be unable to come up with the kind of teachers needed.

"There is a mismatch between teacher production and recruitment. The universities produce teachers in fields they prefer. So, there has been an oversupply of graduates in some fields while there have been teacher shortages in other fields," he said.

Science, biology, physics and chemistry are fields that have long faced a lack of teachers. "It's difficult to produce more graduates from these fields as they require students with good academic qualities," Sombat said.

"It is also difficult for faculties of education to provide quality education to their teachers-to-be, because they don't have enough lecturers with expertise in different fields, especially in science and English," he said, adding that they had tried to seek help from lecturers from the faculties of science and faculties of humanities and social sciences.

Sombat said there is an oversupply of graduates in the kindergarten teaching field. Up to 78 universities teach this field, but teacher recruitment for kindergarten level is lower as the country's birth rate drops.

The Consortium of Sixteen Education Deans of Thailand President Prof Sirichai Kanjanawasee also said lots of graduates competed for jobs in urban areas. As a result, these areas area crowded with the most qualified competitors.

"Therefore, there are shortages of physics, chemistry, biology and English-teaching teachers in remote areas. Underprivileged students in those areas receive a worse quality of education," said Sirichai.

Thousands of teachers lecturing in subjects not in the fields in which they graduated had caused troubles for teaching quality, said Prof Somwang Pitiyanuwat, former chairman of the new-breed teacher selection committee.

Somwang added that most were in educational opportunity expansion schools that ordinarily provided for the primary level, but later expanded to teach lower secondary level.

"Each of this group of teachers who teach many different subjects, although they did not graduate from those fields, cannot effectively teach lower secondary students because they have to learn each subject with more difficult contents than those in primary levels," he said.

To end the problem of mis-match between teacher produc-tion and recruitment, all educa-

tion experts urged the government to survey exact numbers of teachers in demand in different fields, and assess the different requirements of schools in various areas. Also, the production of the universities that produced teachers-to-be had to be limited in oversupply fields and increased in shortage fields.

Sirichai and Sombat said any universities that would be limited by teacher production should provide continuous training to current teachers to help them solve their teaching problems.

"The Office of the Basic Education Commission [Obec] has a number of retired teachers and knows in which fields its schools need teachers. We can help Obec analyse the figures and do a deeper survey to gauge demand at schools in different areas. After analysing the data, we'll be able to create a teacher production plan that meets the real demands of the country," Sirichai said.

Somwang said the new-breed teacher project was an attempt to train teachers in areas that did not have enough qualified teachers. It had tried to select qualified students whose hometowns were in areas suffering shortages of teachers.

The first phase of the project has selected around 3,000 high academic performance students to be trained as good teachers since 2009. The second phase, targeted to produce 30,000 more qualified teachers, is waiting for approval from this government. It will run from this year to 2015, according to Somwang.

"The new-breed teacher project helps attract students with good academic performance. This year, many in science fields of the Education Faculty got higher scores than those at the Faculty of Science at Naresuan University, my university," Sombat said.

Education Minister Woravat Auapinyakul is creating a plan to upgrade skills of current teachers. He said he would adjust some regulations to allow people from different professions without professional teaching licences to teach. So, the teachers as well as students would learn real-life working skills.

"They have to learn what has changed in the world and obtain new knowledge from those in

different professions. Good teaching techniques are no longer enough," he said.

The Nation conducted interviews with each of these academics last week to mark World Teachers' Day, which is held an-nually on October 5 to celebrate the essential role of teachers in providing quality education at all levels.

-- The Nation 2011-10-10

[daiwill60]

A Nation begins to wake up to its problems maybe??? Let's see what happens next, re teacher licence fiascos and getting rid of sanuuk mentalities in the classrooms.

[Scott]

"...After analysing the data, we'll be able to create a teacher production plan that meets the real demands of the country," Sirichai said."

So the gov't will decide your major and your teaching career?

Not the best plan if you want to have motivated teachers.

[Towzak]

All I can say is the change will be a long and slow one

I had a discussion with my school director and he was huffing and puffing about O-net results being down on the previous year. He stated himself that in the past they did not have a system where you could not fail, you had to try or you would fail miserably. But, because of the 'save face' culture (I guess), it wasn't acceptable to fail students as it reflected negatively on the teachers and indeed the school and its directors. Voila! the Thai education system eventually developed into the sham that it is today with all its bases covered. Now you don't really know who is a particularly underachieving student or a seriously under-qualified teacher. In the case of the latter there are certainly many and this of course influences negatively on the levels of student achievement.

Moving back to my discussion. I pointed out that the school was, at some considerable expense, purchasing exam sheets from Bangkok (complete with obligatory grammatical errors) and the students were struggling with them simply because they had not been taught the exam content in the classroom. It's not rocket science, you test your students on what you have taught them and you can't really expect them to score highly when they encounter vocabulary and content that is alien to them. They are seldom taught to think and analyse problems, they just want it on a spoon with big flashing neon lights pointing towards A,B,C or D. Failing that they can just lean over anyway and copy down what class brain Sombat has written down or wait for it to circulate. But, that is not for me to say.

Onwards and upwards

[Ijustwannateach]

Gosh, a plan will completely solve things, for sure. All you have to do is say that you plan that there will be X number of physics teachers produced next year, and there will be! Doesn't matter how much (how little) you're going to pay them, that will magically draw talented science minds into the department!

[flukey7]

After teaching in education for many years, I can tell you that it is not only in Thailand that Students cannot fail, this has also become business practice in the UK. With the government putting pressure constantly on schools and colleges to produce better results and retain constantly high success rates in order to gain funding, education has become a business and the end result is we are producing student's who leave with a piece of paper that is worth nothing. They are being so spoon feed through their whole school, college courses that Employers are not getting anyone who is job ready or anywhere near armed with the knowledge or practical aspects there qualification say they have.

As someone who was passionate about educating people, once we started paying student's to attend school, colleges (another great government initiative) we lost all enthusiasm and the want for learning from the student themselves, and being told that you cannot fail or they cannot fail because we will lose the money for that student if we do, eventually takes away the whole reasons why I personally went into education in the first place.

In the end I could no longer work in that environment anymore and left the education system altogether sadly.

[Abduljabbar01]

Thailand must come to realize it cannot do it alone in this issue. As neighboring countries are excelling in their education practices as noted on a BBC news article concerning China and Singapore. Thailand cannot excel unless they work with other education professionals from other countries. ASEAN and UNESCO have offered assistance, but Thailand has not made any progress with their help. Why is that?

After myself and other foreign teachers who have worked or currently working in both Primary and secondary level schools, mostly government, some private and International schools. Thai teachers mostly older and seem to know it all, reject the assistance or ignore the advice given to them by their fellow foreign teachers who they employ to teach their students. Why is that? They don’t have faith in us or are so xenophobic of other cultures; it’s an infection that’s killing their culture not improving. Thailand’s Ministry of Education (MOE) or Teachers Council of Thailand (TCT), requires foreign teachers to take the “Thai Culture Exam”, seems like Thai who work in Education need to take an “International Culture lecture and exam”. Why is that?

International schools use their nation’s curriculum and standards to teach their students and most of them excel in their studies and goes on to educational institutions abroad. Some students come back and some don’t. Recognizing the flaws in their own country and choose not to help, we understand.

Thailand MOE can simply raise the bar. Require all teachers to have a 4 year degree in Education with a certified Teaching qualification from their country of origin. Exams given by MOE to people who want to work here, the so called, Teachers exams. Their flawed and cannot be used as a way to see if someone is qualified as a teacher.

Thai students who do want to succeed and not be trapped within this society “Caste system”. They go to tutorial schools after their normal studies.

Good day.