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I

School:

General Information and Administration

School Profile

I was assigned by Valaya Alongkorn Rajabhat University Under the Royal Patronage at Sathit Bangna School, or the Bangna Demonstration School, a private school located in the southeast of Bangkok at Samut Prakan province. According to its official website, the school was founded by Khun Ratsri Kraiwin, a former Vice President of the Supreme Court. He molded the school into an institution that would provide quality education outside of the numerous nuances that come with dense cities, thereby basing it on a suburban foundation with sports and closeness to nature as its primary pedagogical traits. The school caters primary and secondary education and has an outpost adjacent to the main campus dedicated for Kindergarten. It’s largely noted across Thailand for its excellent primary education and its investment on sports and corresponding facilities. Additionally, the school also employs several international teachers that work alongside each other in furthering its drive towards its learners’ mastery of the English language.  

Academic Support System

The school employs the following academic support systems to meet and encourage its learners’ holistic development: 

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Classroom-based strategies: Teachers usually teach in pairs, with one being in-charge of activity and curriculum oriented lessons and the other being on culture and speaking. These tasks are distributed to a bilingual speaker and a native speaker respectively. This set-up also allows greater supervision and support to the learners as a lesson progresses, as only one teacher will primarily do the discussion, leaving the other to do the needed scaffolding and monitoring of learners’ progress at the sides. 


After-hours strategies: The school offers after-hour classes, coined as “special classes”, to learners who are either struggling to keep up in their class or are advanced. This allows for a more flexible and direct application of differentiated learning which sets out to balance the curriculum’s expected difficulty with the learners’ actual level. 

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Outside-of-school strategies: A notable off-campus activity which the school annually does is “English Camp”, a three-day learning camping held at a resort which allows learners to engage and use the English language in a setting and environment that they are most comfortable in, employing the elements of fun and games in delivering the lessons/content. 

Teaching System

The school’s administrative body and its corresponding teaching system are much like any other school, with a principal at the helm of operations and the faculty at the grassroots. In the administrative level, its primary difference is the inclusion of a foreign teachers’ department, with its faculty head, also a foreign teacher, organizing and collating the voices of the foreign employees of the school. On the classroom level, the difference is in its emphasis on collaborative teaching—a setup wherein two foreign teachers, along with a Thai homeroom teacher, facilitates the class, with one doing the primary discussions and the other offering scaffolding and classroom management support.

Materials and Other Learning Sources

As with most other schools, the primary learning source in the school is its library. Their library, however, is very well-stocked and books that cater to different reading levels and fields of study are plentiful. Additionally, quality English books can also be found, along with a row of computers and a dedicated laser-printer. On the classrooms, the learners are provided with textbooks and other pertinent materials such as notebooks and portfolios. In their English classes, Cambridge University Press ESL books are utilized.  

Measurement and Evaluation System

The following grading system is used in the school’s primary and secondary levels: 

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4.0 = 80-100%   (Highest Attainable Grade) 
3.5 = 75-79% 
3.0 = 70-74%
2.5 = 65-69%
2.0 = 60-64%
1.5 = 55-59%
1.0 = 50-49%
 0   = 0-49%   (Lowest Attainable Grade) 

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With regards to the grading system in general, an emphasis on the ideology of “no child left behind” is widely implemented. This translates to failing learners receiving additional scaffold and support from the concerend teacher in order to increase the chances of his/her passing the class, and ultimately, the grade level. This appraoch, however, is scaled to the exerted effort and academic aptitiude of the child. If the teacher deems it necessary for the child to repeat an exam or an entire grade level if s/he truly cannot acheive the expected standards, then the teacher may justifiably enforce his/her judgement, provided that additional support and instruction to the concerned child is given. 
 

Curriculum

As I was handling only Englsih throughout my stay in the school, I was only privy to the subject's specifics. To the best of my knowledge, the school’s English curriculum doesn't adhere to a national or centralized model, rather, it follows the prescribed lessons and activities put forth by Cambridge University Press in its set of Cambrigde Global English, Activity and Learner’s books. Furthermore, the  life applications and values infused within the lessons are grounded on the “7 Habits”, a set of pedagogical paradigms that were originally created and patented by Stephen R. Covey and published in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. 

Teaching Plan

As I elaborated on the previous points, the school’s English “curriculum” is grounded heavily on the purported activities and lessons in the textbooks bought from Cambridge University Press. Based on my discussions with my teacher-mentors, however, I gathered that the primary outcome that the school desires is for its learners to be able to speak the language fluently. It follows, then, that the teaching plans administered to the learners center on that key competence – speaking.

 

This is achieved by employing native speakers in the school so learners may experience first-hand a true English-only setting in the classroom, as well as providing a benchmark for the sub-skills required in speaking, namely: diction, vocabulary, intonation, pronunciation, and speed patterns. 

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Another teacher, usually a bilingual Asian teacher, labors through the written and other activities or exercises explicitly found in the textbooks. The content of the lessons are irrelevant, as the Units dont really have academic cohesion, i.e. Unit I for example tackles about the Human Body while Unit II tackles about the different continents in the planet. The content is considered a secondary element of teaching, whats more important is for the learners to be able to understand, read, write, and most importantly, speak the language.  
 

Photos

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