Teaching seminar helps banish boredom from the classroom

BORING lessons are an obstruction to a student’s academic success, so Boeing Company and the Kenan Institute Asia started the Boeing Technology Enhance Learning (BoeingTEL) project to train teachers in new techniques to make the learning experience more interesting and fun.

“Student participation during the teaching process is the key,” Jantana Ngamjan, a maths teacher at Nonthaburi’s Nakornnon Wittaya 2 School and one of the project’s 10 master teachers in 2014, said last week. 

Students’ role in the classroom used to be merely listening to what the teacher taught, which made them feel bored and turned off to studying. But this new teaching methodology encourages teachers and students to interact more, so students enjoy the lessons and improve their learning, she said. 

She plans several activities in class to make students more confident and take an active part.

“Students usually avoid answering the teacher’s questions. So I use a tactic called ‘turn and talk’, which allows students to discuss the questions in groups and then answer. This way they will have more confidence to answer,” she said.

Another key component of this new teaching strategy is relevance to real life. By linking a lesson with daily life, teachers help students understand the lesson better and remember it longer. 

For example, Jantana taught a lesson about ratios by using a flyer from a department store to teach students how much goods were discounted. 

“This new style of teaching is effective,” she said.

The heart of enjoyable lessons is the teaching script, so the project, for five years now, holds a seminar every April on how to manage an interesting class by using teaching scripts. The next session will run from April 27-28. 

After the seminar, project staff follow up with the teachers, who can also get their teaching session recorded for the selection of 10 master teachers of the year.

Last year, the project trained 223 teachers from 48 schools in Bangkok and the surrounding provinces of Samut Prakan, Nonthaburi and Nakhon Nayok.

Chodok Panyawaranant, manager of Boeing TEL, said the script comprises five steps: warm up (possibly with a game to jog the students’ memory of a previous lesson and get students’ attention); introduction (teacher raising questions for students to think on their own and discuss in a group); body session (class activity such as science experiments or students’ presentations in front of the classroom); closing (teacher linking the lesson to daily life); and assessment (teacher requiring students to produce “Exit Tickets” by writing the lesson’s core content onto Post-It notes and posting them on the blackboard).

The script helps solve the problem of teachers not being able to teach all of the prepared lesson within the class period, said Piya-anong Nisawattananan, a science teacher at Nonthaburi’s Nakornnon Wittaya 3 School. 

“The teaching script clearly specifies what and how long the activity will be done in class,” she said. 

Although writing a script could be a bit hard, it pays off. The script makes the class run smoothly and it is very easy for teachers to follow it. 

“Compared to the old teaching style, I feel less tired by using this technique,” she said.

“When I see students answering my questions, I feel very happy... It seems to make students excited to learn and try things, while also making me more organised and having clearer steps of teaching in 60 minutes. 

“Teaching becomes easier for me and learning easier for students, who become happy to study and their scores are better,” she said.

One of Piya-anong’s seventh graders, Watcharapon Klahan, said studying was fun and science lessons were easier to understand compared to other subjects. 

“I like teacher Piya-anong’s class because I like experiments and related activities,” he said.

For other teachers, the project seems like a good idea. 

Siriwan Chankhuntod, a Chinese language teacher at Nakhon Ratchasima’s Boonwattana School, said she became interested after reading the guidelines of the Boeing TEL. 

“This technique is suitable for the new age of teaching. It uses multimedia and technology to aid in teaching and increases students’ role in class. I think it can be adopted in many subjects.”