ATP, School of Hospitality and Tourism, is actually training
Sopheak the basics of cooking skills. Our goal is to have a cooking teacher in
order to strengthen the teaching of professional skills to our students.
It also gave me the opportunity to know more about ATP which
appears to be a pretty reliable training center.
It happens that they offer a special course for the teacher!
They teach 18 methods/tools to deliver the best teaching
ever!
Our teachers are great but they definitely need some input
to make their teaching more effective.
So far, our teachers are “translators”. They try to understand
and translate the ASEAN books into Khmer. It makes the lessons pretty
ineffective simply because they are boring and inadequate. The books definitely
need to be adapted, in fact we should use them only to create new materials
which would be more relevant to our students’ needs.
This teacher training could provide us quickly with good
basics to improve our lessons.
ATP trains technical teachers in all fields of the tourism
sector such as housekeeping, hotel reception… They use the professional skills
to demonstrate the 18 training tools they teach.
It seems to be exactly what we need right now!
I would take this course too because it would give me all
information to guide the teachers in the implementation of what they’ve learnt.
ATP provides in-house training, meaning that they can come
to our place to train us. They do so for a group of minimum 5 trainees (and 10
maximum). The training lasts 2 days which is convenient to fit in our schedule
before the new academic year 2020/2021.
The cost is $150 per trainee. It would therefore cost us
from $750 for 5 teachers to $1500 for 10 teachers.
Our medium term project could be:
1st step: Take this training course with ATP any
time before the next school year. (Before October 2020)
2nd step: Guide the teachers to use the tools
they will have learnt by then, in their lesson-planning and in their classrooms
while teaching the students.
3rd step: Guide and follow the teachers to create
materials that will replace the ASEAN books. (NB: the ASEAN books, including
the Trainee Manual, will be used by the teacher only to know what he has to
teach. In some cases, the manual itself could be used if it’s adapted to our
needs)
4th step:
a-
Create a database for each module we teach.
Collect all the documents created by the teachers.
b-
Evaluate the impact on our students and modify
if necessary.
c-
Realize and print a “Saint Francois Technical/Professional
School Book” for each module.
1-
Year 1 2020/2021: Collect documents/lesson plans
+ teach with new materials + evaluate + realize 1st draft of the book + print
2-
Year 2 - 2021/2022: use our book in class,
evaluate, modify, get feedback from our students, enrich it + Print a reviewed
version (2nd draft)
3-
Year 3 - 2022/2023: Use our 2nd
version in our classes for the different modules, put the final touches to it.
Print the 3rd and definitive version, one per module.
4-
From academic year 2023/2024, all our teachers
and students will be using home-made books. Nevertheless, we’ll keep collecting
ideas leading to further improvements. The book could be reviewed all each year.
d-
Share our work with others (Others Schools,
Ministry, some ASEAN related structures)
Preparatory work:
It happens that Teacher Tongsy is pregnant and will stop
teaching at the end of March 2020, after the first semester’s exam. She will be
back for the new school year.
Ms. Chenda, the head of the Tourism department, told me that
she might ask me to cover for Tongsy during semester 2.
That could be a great opportunity for me to work with the
ASEAN book, create new materials, and experiment new methodologies the way I’ll
be asking the teachers to do from next school year. My work, starting around
the Khmer New Year, will provide some kind of example to refer to, it will make
what I expect the teachers to do easier to explain and to understand. It will
also help me evaluate the quantity of work it involves; I expect it to be
rather heavy!
There is definitely a lot of work ahead but how great it is!
To finish, I’d like to draw your attention on the photos
bellow. There are from the Facebook page of ATP. They really demonstrate the good
professionalism of this training center…
