Category: - Bayon English Academy

Bayon English Academy

Teacher Training: Final Thoughts

4/12/2014

The BEA teacher trainees first impressions about teaching sure did change over the course of their one-month training program! One of my favorite wrap-up activities is to have the trainees complete the sentence "Teaching is..." on a small poster and explain it to their group on the last training day. I then give them the poster they made on their first day of teacher training for them to see how much they changed during the program. The BEA trainees will go on to work at other local NGO schools, and of course, we hire our own trainees to become part of the BEA teaching team after they go through additional training for our school's programs.

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Teacher Training Highlights: Student Volunteers

1/12/2014

For BEA’s teacher training program, the trainees had to teach three speaking classes and two listening ones. To fill up the seats in the classes, we asked our own BEA students to volunteer for the trainees’ teaching practices. Trainees usually had 10 to 15 students in each of their classes, which were streamlined with basic, pre-intermediate or intermediate students. Some BEA students even volunteers every single day during the two weeks of teaching practices! Here they are trying to decide which classes to volunteer for some extra English instruction.

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Teacher Training Highlights: How to Teach Listening

26/11/2014

In addition to learning how to teach speaking lessons, the BEA trainees also learned how to teach listening. This is particularly challenging in most Cambodian settings since teachers usually don't have access to audio equipment. Most schools are lucky to have a whiteboard and a few markers. Before the trainees learned how to adapt listening to different types of learning environments, they had to illustrate the "shape" of a listening lesson and then explain the reasoning for this lesson shape. As you can see, one trainee drew a diagram of Angkor Wat to represent listening lesson structure!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Teacher Training Highlights: Group Teaching Practices

25/11/2014

The BEA teacher trainees are definitely relieved to be finished with their one-month intensive training program. Now, we’re just waiting for the Ministry of Education to issue BEA’s government-accredited teacher training certificates.

To ease the trainees into teaching their very own group of students, they got plenty of group practice putting theoretical concepts into actual practice. Their demonstration lessons included teaching vocabulary, using grammar time lines, incorporating games, as well as addressing different learning styles in their lessons. Despite a bit of nervousness during these mini-lessons, the trainees pulled-off their sessions with creativity and resourcefulness!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Thoughts on Teaching

7/10/2014

The BEA teacher trainees made it through their first week of teacher training. All of them didn’t expect that there’d be so much work, and that teaching is much harder than it looks. I can’t wait to see how they views on teaching change over the next three weeks. Check out some of their initial ideas about teaching from the first training session.

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Teacher Training Month Kicks Off at BEA

2/10/2014

It's only day three of BEA's teacher training program, but as one trainee said yesterday "Only the third day...it seems like it's been a week." For the 2014-15 program, I've made a few changes that include more teaching practices and extended observation opportunities. In all, the trainees have 35 hours of instruction that cover teaching methodologies and educational psychology, 10 hours of observing lessons taught by experienced teachers, 5 hours of teaching practice (teaching their own lessons), and 10 hours of group and individual feedback sessions on their teaching practices over the entire month of October. It's indeed the most intense out of all the training programs at BEA, but it's truly amazing to see the trainees develop so quickly over such a short period of time. Also, since the trainees are BEA students, they start to realize that even though Teacher Shally and I make teaching look easy, it's actually more complicated that it looks.

If you're interested in how the BEA trainees are becoming language teachers, check out our jam-packed schedule. If you're interested in how the BEA trainees are becoming language teachers, check out our jam-packed schedule.

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Lesson Planning at BEA

8/9/2013

Hi everyone!

One of the most time-consuming jobs that we have at BEA is lesson planning especially since that there are almost no localized textbooks and materials for Cambodian learners here in Siem Reap. Nevertheless, part of BEA's mission is to help other Cambodian teachers (and any other ESL/EFL teachers) with their own lessons through sharing the lesson plans and materials that we design specifically for Cambodian learners. However, many of our lessons can be adapted for other types of learners and cultures, too.

As a teacher-trainer, one of the biggest challenges I've noticed that novice language teachers face is how to plan their lessons. Model lesson plans and materials are often a good stepping stone in helping new teachers develop their own lesson planning strategies and personal teaching style. This is especially essential in Cambodian where many teachers don't have access to training opportunities and even the time to plan lessons since many have to work two jobs to support themselves whether they are public school English teachers or those at non-government organizations (NGOs). In addition, many of the available resources here in Cambodia are outdated and culturally inappropriate.

Unfortunately, we can only offer our teacher-training program once a year to our own BEA kids because we simply don't have the funding to offer it to more interested teachers. In the meantime, however, we can still help Cambodian teachers through offering our localized lessons and materials online through the BEA website.

For our first lesson, we have a Basic level lesson for teachers with students who are completely new to the English language. By this, we mean students who have both minimal speaking and writing skills. In most cases, students can only respond to "What's your name?" and "How are you?" Many teachers might be overwhelmed at how to teach basic level students only in English and without resorting to their native language, but it can be done. We do it at BEA every year and with great success! Our basic-level BEA kids become competent speakers in less than a year, and even have enough communicative ability to start looking for work in the tourist industry here in Siem Reap. Our first lesson is a "get to know you" lesson than can be used during the first week of classes with your new students.

Good luck and have fun!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education with professional teachers in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

"Getting to Know You" Lesson Plan and Materials
File Size:	219 kb
File Type:	pdf

BEA's First Teacher Training Program

14/8/2012

BEA's very first teacher training will be starting on August 20 and run for almost two weeks. This will be an intensive program in which the trainees will receive 20 hours of classroom instruction on teaching methodology and classroom practices. In addition, trainees will also complete a 15-hour teaching practicum. This means that they will have to prepare their own lessons and teach in front of a group of BEA students, observe lessons of other trainee's, and participate in group feedback sessions about their lessons. It's definitely going to be a very busy two weeks for both the trainees and myself. Since we don't have a lot of time before the start of our 2012-13 school year, I've decided to focus on methods used for teaching speaking skills in an ESL/EFL classroom. When I come back to Cambodia in January, I'll run another training program with a focus on the other skills.

As for the trainees, we'll have four of our own students from the advanced course participating in the program. Rithea, our new teacher, will be one of them, and we'll also have Los, Dany and Sarith, who had applied for the teaching position back in July. This training program will prepare them with teaching skills so that they can work at BEA or at another local school in the future. In Rithea's case, her training will be more extensive since she'll be working at BEA. Over the course of the first semester, she'll learn how to set-up, run and evaluate each of BEA's language programs with help from Shally, BEA's head teacher. Rithea will also participate in BEA's online teacher-training program, which will focus on lesson plan design, revision and reflection.

Later on today, I'll be meeting with all the trainees to go through our training schedule for next week, and of course, to assign homework for our first session. I'm looking forward to working with this group of talented BEA students! I know they'll make me proud as usual!

If you're interesting in what we'll be covering during BEA's first teacher-training program, you can take a look at our schedule below. We're hoping that this will be the first of many training programs at BEA!

Back to the books...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

BEA's New Teacher, Course Changes & Teacher Training

3/8/2012

Hi everyone,

Shally and I have been incredibly busy since I got back to Siem Reap last week, and with BEA going into its third school year this September, there seems to be even less time to update our website and the blog. Anyways, we have a lot of news to share with you!

BEA’s New Teacher:
Shally’s workload as head teacher and managing director has been overwhelming this past year, especially since he had to teach four classes every day. He had almost 200 teaching days, which meant he taught 800 lessons covering our Basic, Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate courses. We decided a few months ago to hire a new teacher to help decrease his teaching workload so that he can have more time for managing the school. Last week, we accepted teaching applications from our Intermediate course students.

We thought it would be best to hire in-house since the new teacher would be familiar with our programs as a student. After reviewing the applications, we then chose four of them to come for interviews with an interview in Khmer with Shally and an interview in English with myself. Both Shally and I decided that Rithea Leang Reth was the most outstanding out of all the applicants, and gave her the position.    It was such a difficult decision for both of us, but we’re hoping once we can expand over the next few years, we’ll be able to hire more of our students as teachers.

Rithea told me yesterday that she was so happy and proud to be working for BEA. When she saw our Facebook announcement, she showed it to her parents and her mother kissed her because she was so proud of her. Rithea is planning to work for BEA for about two years, and then she would like to get her university degree in business administration at an overseas university.

Course Changes & Teacher Training
Because of our new teacher, we’ve had to make some changes to our 2012-13 school year courses. Since BEA has a very unique and demanding program, it’ll take at least six months to a year to train our new teacher, so we needed to re-organize our teaching schedule to accommodate teacher training. From September, Shally will be teaching the Intermediate (5:00-6:00pm) and Advanced (6:00-7:00pm) courses. Our new teacher will start out with just one course for the year, the Pre-Intermediate (4:00-5:00pm) course.

Rithea’s formal teacher-training will start run from August 20-29 in which she’ll learn about BEA’s programs, theoretical and practical components of teaching, and teaching practices with small classes of volunteer BEA students. These teaching practices will prepare her for her own classes starting in September. She’ll get about 25 hours of formal instruction during these two weeks of training. Once she starts her own course in September, I’ll be team-teaching and lesson planning with her for about three weeks. In addition, Rithea will also be assisting Shally with his Intermediate course from 5:00-6:00pm.   In this way, she’ll be able to observe two experienced teachers in action. Moreoever, Rithea will continue her English studies in the Advanced course from 6:00-7:00pm.

Once I head back to Japan at the end of September, I’ll be continuing Rithea’s teacher-training with skype sessions 2-3 times per week. Shally has been participating in this online training program since we first opened the school in 2010. I’ll be continuing this with both of them with Rithea’s pre-intermediate course and Shally’s advanced course during the school year. At the 2012 CamTESOL conference, Shally and I discussed this type of training in our presentation on Teaching Methodologies in the Cambodian Classroom.  If you’re interested in our teaming teaching and online training, you can see our process in the diagrams below.

Anyways, there is still more news to tell about TOEIC testing and registrations, but I’ll save that for a later posting.

Back to the books….

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Writing Workshops 2012

13/2/2012

Hi everyone,

Sorry it’s been such a long time since our last BEA blog posting. I’ve been back in Siem Reap since mid-January, and it’s been non-stop for both Shally and I. The end of the semester is always the hardest mainly because we don’t have enough staff to over part of our workload. What I wouldn’t do to hire a full-time test-marker and a website manager! Anyways, we’ve been making regular updates on our Facebook page, so that’s another way you can keep up with everything that’s been going on at BEA.

Writing Workshops: Teacher & Student Challenges
I wasn’t able to blog daily about the writing classes this year because most of my time was spent revising our workshops from last year, and marking first and final drafts. However, I think we’ll be able to produce our own writing textbook for next year’s writing workshop for the Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses.

Rather than having two writing tasks this year, we decided to have just one, but spent more time on classroom instruction. One of the biggest challenges students had last year, as well as this year, was logically connecting their ideas and details in their paragraphs. Although we spent four lessons on paragraph structure, this still wasn’t enough time for the students to fully understand the structure of writing in English. For next year’s lessons, students definitely need more classroom practice on differentiating between supporting ideas and details, as well as choosing appropriate details for ideas. This was a challenge for students in all of our courses. One of the reasons for this is that most of the students are not taught writing in their own language in public school. Most writing classes end at the end of primary school. As a result, this becomes quite challenging for the kids since they have to use critical thinking skills for the first time, and in a second language!

Regardless, the majority of the students were able to produce a well-written paragraph. Some of their writings will be uploaded to the Journals and Writing Workshops on the website in the next few weeks. I’m also hoping to make the lessons and materials from the Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses available on the site for other Cambodian teachers. The Intermediate lessons won’t be available until next year since they need to be revised and re-tested in the classroom so that all the kinks can be worked out.

Writing Workshops: Teacher Training
During last year’s writing workshops, I taught almost all the classes. However, for this year’s workshops, Shally taught the majority of the lessons. This is part of Shally’s on-going teacher training program as part of his professional development. We have set up a system in which I plan his writing lessons, as well as the lessons in the Intermediate course, and he teaches them using my plans. We have found this to be an effective training technique because these model lessons help him with his own lesson planning. Since writing is the most challenging to teach out of the four skills, this was a challenge for him. Although it was his first time teaching writing, he did an amazing job, especially in his explanations of paragraph structure. One of his strengths is that he’s able to give concise examples to get the point across to the students – all in English. Even the students in our Basic course, who were complete beginners at the start of the school year, were able to follow in English-only instruction. In the end, most of students did indeed use correct paragraph structure and wrote on topic for their tasks.

End of the Semester:
The end of the first semester is coming to an end this week for the BEA kids and staff. We’ll be holding student conferences, as well as having semester wrap-up activities in class. Since lesson planning won’t be as demanding this week, I’ll be able to blog a bit more about what we’re up to before our break.

In the meantime, it’s back to the books…

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.