Poor recruiting hurts quality of teachers
Wannapa Khaopa
The Nation 2011-10-10
Critics complain of both shortages, oversupply at many levels.
Thailand has up to 660 educational programmes available for producing teachers, but many of these programmes have not responded to the country's demand in terms of quality and quantity.
Assoc Prof Sombat Noparak, president of the Thailand Education Deans Council, said that without a plan that looked into the real demands of agencies that recruit teachers, universities would be unable to come up with the kind of teachers needed.
"There is a mismatch between teacher production and recruitment. The universities produce teachers in fields they prefer. So, there has been an oversupply of graduates in some fields while there have been teacher shortages in other fields," he said.
Science, biology, physics and chemistry are fields that have long faced a lack of teachers. "It's difficult to produce more graduates from these fields as they require students with good academic qualities," Sombat said.
"It is also difficult for faculties of education to provide quality education to their teachers-to-be, because they don't have enough lecturers with expertise in different fields, especially in science and English," he said, adding that they had tried to seek help from lecturers from the faculties of science and faculties of humanities and social sciences.
Sombat said there is an oversupply of graduates in the kindergarten teaching field. Up to 78 universities teach this field, but teacher recruitment for kindergarten level is lower as the country's birth rate drops.
The Consortium of Sixteen Education Deans of Thailand President Prof Sirichai Kanjanawasee also said lots of graduates competed for jobs in urban areas. As a result, these areas area crowded with the most qualified competitors.
"Therefore, there are shortages of physics, chemistry, biology and English-teaching teachers in remote areas. Underprivileged students in those areas receive a worse quality of education," said Sirichai.
Thousands of teachers lecturing in subjects not in the fields in which they graduated had caused troubles for teaching quality, said Prof Somwang Pitiyanuwat, former chairman of the new-breed teacher selection committee.
Somwang added that most were in educational opportunity expansion schools that ordinarily provided for the primary level, but later expanded to teach lower secondary level.
"Each of this group of teachers who teach many different subjects, although they did not graduate from those fields, cannot effectively teach lower secondary students because they have to learn each subject with more difficult contents than those in primary levels," he said.
To end the problem of mis-match between teacher produc-tion and recruitment, all educa-
tion experts urged the government to survey exact numbers of teachers in demand in different fields, and assess the different requirements of schools in various areas. Also, the production of the universities that produced teachers-to-be had to be limited in oversupply fields and increased in shortage fields.
Sirichai and Sombat said any universities that would be limited by teacher production should provide continuous training to current teachers to help them solve their teaching problems.
"The Office of the Basic Education Commission [Obec] has a number of retired teachers and knows in which fields its schools need teachers. We can help Obec analyse the figures and do a deeper survey to gauge demand at schools in different areas. After analysing the data, we'll be able to create a teacher production plan that meets the real demands of the country," Sirichai said.
Somwang said the new-breed teacher project was an attempt to train teachers in areas that did not have enough qualified teachers. It had tried to select qualified students whose hometowns were in areas suffering shortages of teachers.
The first phase of the project has selected around 3,000 high academic performance students to be trained as good teachers since 2009. The second phase, targeted to produce 30,000 more qualified teachers, is waiting for approval from this government. It will run from this year to 2015, according to Somwang.
"The new-breed teacher project helps attract students with good academic performance. This year, many in science fields of the Education Faculty got higher scores than those at the Faculty of Science at Naresuan University, my university," Sombat said.
Education Minister Woravat Auapinyakul is creating a plan to upgrade skills of current teachers. He said he would adjust some regulations to allow people from different professions without professional teaching licences to teach. So, the teachers as well as students would learn real-life working skills.
"They have to learn what has changed in the world and obtain new knowledge from those in
different professions. Good teaching techniques are no longer enough," he said.
The Nation conducted interviews with each of these academics last week to mark World Teachers' Day, which is held an-nually on October 5 to celebrate the essential role of teachers in providing quality education at all levels.
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