Category: Teaching Methods

BEA's Annual Evaluations

1/8/2014

Although it's the last week of the 2013-14 school year at BEA, the kids were kept busy as usual. In order to evaluate our programs and facilities, as well as to collect statistics for publications, we carry out a 100-question survey before the start of the summer break. The survey is completed as a one-hour class lesson: our teachers the purpose and procedure of the survey in both English and Cambodian, and ask students to write comments in English. For those students who can't complete the survey during the lesson, they're allowed to take it home for homework and submit it the next day. The questionnaire is divided into seven sections: (1) facilities; (2) materials; (3) programs; (4) teaching; (5) progress; (6); library program; (7) certificates; and (8) professionalism and future. Students answer the questions according to a four-point scale (strongly disagree = 1; disagree = 2; agree = 3; strongly agree = 4) and have the option of writing comments in comment boxes throughout the survey.

In the next few months, Nicole's first research paper on BEA's language program will appear in "Task-Based Language Teaching in Asia: Challenges, Opportunities and Future Directions" as part of a collection of academic articles. The title of her paper is a bit of a tongue-twister: "Bridging Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based Language Teaching in Cambodia: Learners’ Reactions to an Integrated Program in the Non-Formal Education Sector." Her article describes BEA's language program and analyzes the attitudes of the students towards the school's teaching methods. Our school evaluations help with providing valuable statistics and opinions for publications like these.

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.

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BEA's First Teacher Training Program

14/8/2012

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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.

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BEA's New Teacher, Course Changes & Teacher Training

3/8/2012

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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.

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Student Evaluations and Conferences

29/7/2011

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Hi everyone,

Yesterday was a super busy day for everyone at BEA with student evaluations and conferences.

Evaluations
My morning started out making the student evaluation. I had wanted more time to prepare it, but of course, there is never any extra time because preparing lessons takes up most of our mornings, so administrative work has to be during the few free moments of the day.

Anyways, this was my very first time to make a formal research evaluation. This one is a trial run before I do a more formal evaluation of the school next year. It was indeed a challenge because there were so many areas to cover. I included facilities, materials, curriculum, teaching, improvement and general headings on the survey with five subheadings for the curriculum section: speaking and listening, writing workshop, journal writing, task-based project and tests. There were 100 questions in total! Student had to read each question and then rank it on a four-point scale: disagree (1), somewhat disagree (2), somewhat agree (3) and agree (4). In addition, there were comments boxes where students could make suggestions and give their own comments.

During the evaluations, I was available for the students to ask any questions. Most of the students needed a few vocabulary terms explained to them. Ideally, we'll have more time next year to translate the survey into Khmer so that we can avoid any misunderstandings.

I'll be on a working holiday from next week, so one of my jobs is to go through the surveys and calculate the results. However, I had a quick glimpse of the surveys last night, and almost all of the comments were very positive, especially towards Shally and his teaching style. Many students also commented that BEA's teaching methods, the communicative approach (CA) and task-based learning (TBL), were new to them, but a good way to learn English. Once I get through these surveys, I'll make the results available on the website.

For those of you who are interested in how we evaluated our program, you can see pages 4-5 of BEA's annual evaluation at the end of today's blog posting.

Student Conferences
Shally had an incredibly busy day yesterday with student conferences. We have these student-teacher meetings at the end of each semester. The students get some one-on-one time with Shally to discuss any concerns about their learning at BEA. In addition, Shally explains the student's progress and final grades. Each student is given about 10 minutes, but often they want to talk much longer with Shally about other personal concerns.

During the student conferences, Shally also informed the students about the new teaching schedule from September. We'll be adding another class, so BEA will be starting from 3:00pm and finishing at 6:50pm. We will be having 50 minutes lessons instead of hour lessons. The reason we had to make this change is that many of the girls who wanted to register for the pre-intermediate course last year were not allowed because 7:30pm was too late for them to be returning home. In general, Cambodian parents are very protective of their girls and they are required to be home before sunset.

In addition, it was brought to our attention during the year that a few students were studying at other English language schools with the help of a sponsor. Shally and I agreed that it's no fair to enroll students who are already studying under sponsorship at another language schools because there are so many youth who have no chance at all to study anywhere. Those students were a bit upset because they do not want to give up their studies at BEA. Regardless, we need to give an equal chance to those who have no chance at all in the village.

Shally will be kept very busy today with the second part of student conferences and pre-registration.

I still can't believe we made it through the year...well, almost, just one more day...

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.

BEA Annual Evaluation Sample
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BEA's Annual Evaluations

BEA's First Teacher Training Program

BEA's New Teacher, Course Changes & Teacher Training

Student Evaluations and Conferences

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