Plus the Video Evidence of the reformation of the school in practice

The Reformation at Petchaburi Panayanukul schooi 2018 to 2021

Petchaburui Panyanukul school has always been a high-quality care centre for students with severe learning difficulties including those with Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Autism and general brain damage. The students ranging from 5 to 20 years of age have a wide range of abilities. The 428 students are well fed, well dressed, and well loved by all the 79 teachers.

The school had a weak curriculum and the teachers were not confident on what to teach. When the students failed to learn the teachers blamed the lack of success on the disability of the students. As a consequence the students spent much of the day doing very little except sleeping, whilst the teachers relaxed and talked to each other. The children were unable to talk to each other, many of them did not make friends, they were isolated and loneliness was a common feature.

In 2018 Dr Humphreys moved to Hua Hin from The University of Hong Kong where he had spent fifteen years as an International Research Fellow developing innovative approaches to working with schools for students with severe learning difficulties. Previously he had worked as Head of Special Education at Northumbria University in England and also in Iceland, Malta and Israel.

When he built his home in Hua Hin he quickly developed a link with Petchaburi Panyanukul school through his colleague Napa Kaewtem who was President of the The Royal Hua Hin Thai Rotary Club. This link was the start of a five-year project of which we are now in the third year.

There were many problems many of which were the mindsets of the teachers who thought the students were incapable of learning. They did not realise that it was the teachers who had the disability as they did not understand the students. All the students were capable of being successful at their own level of ability and all the students had intellectual potential. So We began by talking about ability and not disability, to talk about children and not handicaps

Then we started to assess the students according to a new Thai National Curriculum scale which was adapted from a mixture of the English assessment for children with severe learning difficulties integrated with the Grades of learning from the Thai National Curriculum. The teachers constructed a Sumret scale (success scale) which allowed every pupil to be assessed on their standard of success in every strand of learning of every subject of the national curriculum. The teachers began to appreciate that all the students had different levels of success and at each of these levels the students could be taught to learn. The document was so successful that it was recognized by the Thai Ministry of Education.

This was a great achievement by the teachers if the school. The lead of the Director Ajarn Weera King Keaw was essential as he provided time for the teachers to learn and work on the new document. At the same time, it was recognized that the internet infrastructure of the school was weak, and a significant upgrade was required. In providing this upgrade all the teachers started to use the internet to develop their teaching and learning skills. Technology Enhanced Leaning was being introduced and text-books were seen as being out of date in 21st century classrooms

The next major breakthrough was to change from using cartoon based text-books to Schemes of Work with real life examples of learning in the real world. Schemes of Work meant that teachers had to understand the concepts underpinning the national curriculum subjects that were teaching and not to rely on the text-book answers. Teachers had a write creative lessons based on the wealth of modern information based on the internet. The teachers had to understand the subjects they were teaching at the level at which the students were capable of successfully learning. This was very hard for the teachers to realise that a 15 year-old boy was thinking like a five-year old child or a twelve-year old girl was thinking like a 13 month old baby.

The current challenge we are facing is that the Thai teachers are taught to teach and to talk all the time. This classical style of Thai teaching is old fashioned in a world of technology enhanced learning, he modern teacher is a learner. The modern teacher creates learning opportunities for students to explore. In the new classroom the teacher does not know what the students want to learn, in the modern classroom the teacher learns what the children are doing and is the facilitating guide to promote the student’s curiosity.

This video is the ultimate example of the modern teacher who is not really a teacher, but rather she is a learner using all the examples of the real world with internet enabled computers, electronic tablets, and blue tooth linked televisions to create exciting learning opportunities where children collaborate and talk to each other about their new learning without the teacher’s interference. They record their work on tablets and computers and they share their new learning with the whole class.

As a famous philosopher Bruno Bettleheim once wrote, ‘Love is not enough. The students now are too busy, too excited and too curious to fall asleep.’ This is education, this is the new Reformation of Petchaburi Panyanukul school.