Author/s:
Montebon, Darryl Roy T.*
Philippine Normal University, Philippines (montebon.drt@pnu.edu.ph)
Abstract:
The Project Teacher Exchange for ASEAN Children (TEACH) Program is an international training program that helps teachers from ASEAN countries in their English language proficiency and pedagogic skills. It allows its participants to explore the Filipino traditions through different culture immersion activities as described by Agustin, Montebon, and Rabina (2015). The present research reports the performance of the Thai teacher participants in facilitating inquiry based approach as their culminating activity for their pedagogic training in Project TEACH. The RTOP inquiry based evaluation tool developed by Isola and Wenning (2007) was accomplished by the Thai teacher participants, the students who participated in the demonstration program, and the critic teacher to determine the performance of Thai teacher participants in facilitating inquiry in the classroom. Open ended questions were also incorporated in the questionnaire and a focused group discussion was conducted to further investigate on the performance of the Thai teacher participants in their demonstration. It has been found out that the Thai teacher participants were successful in facilitating inquiry based approach through the 5E model of instruction. However, the Thai teacher participants struggled on asking questions of higher-order thinking. The said struggle has been related to their command of the English language. It is suggested that Project TEACH should provide more trainings to its Thai participants in the art of questioning. For future research, it is suggested that Thai teacher participants be visited and observed in their own classrooms in Thailand to determine if they have applied what they have learned in the Project TEACH program.
Keywords: Project TEACH; ASEAN integration; ASEAN
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2016.1631
*Corresponding Author