RETC Bootcamp

  • Responsibilities: Instructional Design
  • Target Audience: Thai teachers of English
  • Tools Used: WordPress, H5P, Powtoon
  • Year: 2018

Background

This teacher training project aimed to improve pedagogical standards for teachers across Thailand. They attended a three-week intensive course in centres around the country, then returned to their schools to try out the techniques before returning for a short follow-up session.

Our role as e-mentors was to give feedback on short videos that the teachers made of their teaching while back in their own classrooms and then to use some of these videos to produce a training website.

Procedure

Face-to-face

We liaised with face-to-face trainers to be able to go into their training and help teachers to sign up for the IRIS Connect app. This was complicated as many older teachers had little experience online and many younger teachers, though online a lot, did not use email. However, we exceeded our targets and registered nearly all the teachers.

Training materials

While working with the f2f trainers I introduced a Google Form to collect information from the teachers to replace the paper forms which had previously been used. This sped up the process and led to far fewer mistakes.

To give teachers practice with the app I also observed some microteaching and delivered video feedback in the app. This combined the warmth and encouragement of in-person feedback with the permanence of giving it in writing. It also allowed me to give individual feedback which would have been very difficult in the classroom. This was very well-received and helped teachers to have a positive attitude to the app.

Back in the classroom

Teachers returned to their classrooms and did “selfie observations”, placing their smartphones at the back of the class, filming clips of their lessons, and sharing them with us. We gave written feedback on the videos using the app.

Our team was spread across the country so we kept in touch using the LINE app as well as email and met up in Bangkok every few months. I stored the information about my groups in a Google sheet which meant that my manager could easily see what I had done.

At the end of each cohort, we used a Google Form I’d designed to get quantitative and qualitative feedback in order to assess progress and improve the course for the next cohort.

Building the website

By phase 2 we had collected a huge number of videos. These allowed us to:-

  • indentify areas of weakness
  • show examples of good practice
  • show real teachers in their own context

We chose to use WordPress for the site and H5P to create activities. We each took sections of the site and shared one H5P account so that we could see what everyone was doing.

Classroom language

In this activity I used Powtoon to make a video, iMovie to add voiceover, and H5P to make it interactive. I read the incorrect versions of the classroom expressions and a native Thai speaker read the correct ones to provide a good model. We chose the examples by combining lists of the expressions we heard teachers having the most trouble with.

Checking instructions

There were two main issues here:-

  • making good Instruction Checking Questions is very difficult
  • we wanted to encourage a principled use of L1 (Thai) in the classroom

For this activity, which you can try here, I used two Youtube videos with H5P to create multiple-choice, multiple selection and fill-in-the-blanks activities. The videos show good practice but there are also suggestions on how they could be improved.

Giving instructions

Issues:-

  • teachers took on board the idea of asking Instruction Checking Questions and forgot about modelling activities

This activity can also be tried here and is just multiple-choice questions. There are two professionally-made videos and two sent in by teachers from their classrooms. The low quality of one of the videos is actually helpful as it shows that the class was not staged for the camera and that normal teachers were able to do this with their students.

Keeping attention

For this activity, I collaborated with a colleague, Maria, who added pop-ups to draw participants’ attention to salient moments in the videos. There are also True/False questions, multiple-choice questions, and multiple selection questions.

Follow-up

Once the website was up and running we got feedback from teachers and trainers using Survey Monkey, which was overwhelmingly positive.

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