Learner-Centered Teaching Approach: A Paradigm Shift in Thai Education

Mandated by the National Education Act enacted in 1999, the mighty wave of educational reform that swept across the nation in the same year has been making considerable headway in replacing the much condemned “teacher-centered teaching approach” with “learner-centered approach” that has been gaining widespread acceptance and popularity in many countries as a more powerful and more effective educational practice. Thousands and thousands of schoolteachers across the nation have been retrained, and still many more are awaiting to be retrained how to use this new approach in their classrooms. Today, five years after the most ambitious educational reform efforts in this country, “Karn-rien karn-sorn thi yued phurien pen soon-klang” in Thai (meaning “learner-centered teaching and learning”) has entered as one of the prominent and most frequently used phrases among Thai educators although most people outside of education still do not have the slightest idea of what it really means. The message is so loud and clear to all schoolteachers (including university professors and lecturers a well) in this country that it is now the time for them to completely stop using the “teacher-centeredness,” the mindless educational practice that has been damaging Thai education for several decades. Teachers have to change. To survive and advance in their profession, they must demonstrate that they are fully competent to teach and are actually teaching according to the student-centered approach. For those old-timers who still found themselves so comfortable with teacher-centeredness they have been using all their teaching life and unwilling to change, their prospects of making a difference in the teaching profession is likely to be gloomy at a time of paradigm shift in Thai education. This article reviews why learner centered educational practice has been increasingly gaining so such acceptance among Thai educators as well as educational reformers, and why the traditional teacher-centered approach has been widely blamed for educational mediocrity and social and economic illness in this country today