Tangible Education Development: From Classrooms to the Community
"I admire Teach For Thailand's clear objectives: to bring opportunities to schools, reduce inequality, and allow students to learn from insightful individuals with a positive attitude. It is a tangible educational improvement."
The Director of Srirak School, Prachinburi, Ms. Salee Cherd-Choo, has expressed the tangible results that Teach For Thailand (TFT) Fellows have achieved, particularly in inspiring educational personnel in the community.
“The Fellows get the opportunity to improve themselves, which is extraordinary because being a teacher means you are responsible for developing your students. Fellows must have a great attitude to bring themselves into this path towards change.”
Having worked with TFT Fellows from cohorts 7 and 9, Ms. Cherd-Choo was impressed.
“I’ve known about TFT since 2020, and by then, I’d been a director for three years,” she recalled. “They called themselves change agents, which was very powerful.”
“One of them had a degree in Social Science but came here to teach Mathematics. I was skeptical at first, but they proved to be capable. I used to think math was a weakness of humanities and arts students, but the Fellow showed me how much a person can improve if they’re willing to.”
For Ms. Cherd-Choo, ‘change agents’ capture her students’ attention.
“One might ask, why expect two teachers to create a difference on their own? We’re all responsible, so why not become change agents ourselves?” she shared.
“It is not just the two Fellows; the name ‘change agents’ has motivated me and the teachers at the school to improve and grow, and it transcends to our students. We all want to see change, and our students will need to become change agents too. Everybody has become change agents altogether – we can do it ourselves.”
Ms. Cherd-Choo also believes that a good classroom needs to involve the community, and TFT Fellows have helped make this happen.
“Teachers should involve all parties because the classroom belongs to the community,” she stated.
“The Fellows have brought in resources from the community to help with education. One of the Mathematics teachers took students to learn from a successful local business, teaching them about planning and investment. This way, the owner was included as part of the learning.”
“We’ve also established a collective vision. All teachers come and go, but the school stays in the community forever, so community members must set visions and standards for the education they want to see.”
“Had it not been for TFT, this wouldn’t have happened so quickly and tangibly.”
Involving communities in education has been one of Teach For Thailand’s missions, as we believe in the community’s crucial role in making education more sustainable. Teach For Thailand will continue to bring Fellows into classrooms and communities around the country, creating collective visions together, and bringing quality and equality to Thai education.
