Category: Accreditation

Teacher Training Highlights: Group Teaching Practices

25/11/2014

The BEA teacher trainees are definitely relieved to be finished with their one-month intensive training program. Now, we’re just waiting for the Ministry of Education to issue BEA’s government-accredited teacher training certificates.

To ease the trainees into teaching their very own group of students, they got plenty of group practice putting theoretical concepts into actual practice. Their demonstration lessons included teaching vocabulary, using grammar time lines, incorporating games, as well as addressing different learning styles in their lessons. Despite a bit of nervousness during these mini-lessons, the trainees pulled-off their sessions with creativity and resourcefulness!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Prizes for the Best and the Brightest BEA Kids

5/8/2014

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As a part of our annual certificate ceremony, BEA's executive director, Nicole Takeda, awards prizes for the school's best and brightest. Students who earn an overall average of 80 percent and above receive the distinction of "honors" while those with 90 percent and above are distinguished with "first class honors." In addition, students who rank in the top three of their course and those with perfect attendance get special prizes. This year, the BEA kids got notebooks, pens and a Canadian-themed keychain (since Canada is Nicole's birthplace). We also introduced a new award for the "most improved" students. These awards were for those who struggled their first semester at BEA, but then finished the year with passing grades. One student even improved her grade by 34 percent during the second term!!!

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Certificate Ceremony 2013-14

5/8/2014

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Another school year has come to an end at BEA! This year, we had 82 students receive their government accredited certificates for our language program, which included over 200 hours of instruction with our TESOL-trained instructors. Our managing director and head teacher, Shally Toun, taught the Advanced and Intermediate English Language Program while Sarith Sou, our other full-time teacher, had the Pre-Intermediate and Basic course students. Congratulations to our students and teachers for all their hard work this year!!!

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Calm Before the Storm

5/8/2014

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The BEA directors and staff were buzzing around last week with final preparations for our certificate ceremony on Friday, August 1. Nicole and the staff were handling party preparations and awards while Shally was finalizing our government certificates with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, as well as our annual re-accreditation for our programs. This is the first year we decided to hold one big celebration in our library with all the students in our courses rather than individual class parties.

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Candid Shots from BEA's 2012-13 Certificate Ceremony

21/9/2013

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Hi everyone,

For the past three years, I have been the "official" BEA photography for all of our milestones. For each and every one of these, I have failed miserably at trying to get a set of "formal" graduation photos of Shally, my NGO partner and our school's managing director, with the BEA kids. Since Shally had to smile and pose with sixty of the BEA kids who got certificates for all their hard work during the 2012-13 school year, it eventually got too exhausting and then chaos broke out...as usual. Indeed, I have hundreds of "nice" shots, but these are the ones that make me laugh out loud and really show that what we do is much more than just language education. Nobody ever believes that all of our students come from extreme and moderate poverty. It's amazing what just one year with BEA and "Teacher Shally" can do for these kids.

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education with professional teachers in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Ready for Graduation!

20/9/2013

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We're all set for the big day! Shally picked up our certificates signed and stamped from the Ministry of Education while Nicole wrapped up all the gifts for the top students. The BEA kids will be thrilled to get their certificates at our graduation ceremony this afternoon for the 2012-13 school year!!!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education with professional teachers in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Ready for the Big Day

6/9/2013

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Hi everyone!

It’s been an incredibly hectic few weeks at BEA before the start of the 2013-14 school year! Shally, BEA' managing director, handled our big move with true finesse. He's truly a man of all talents from plumber to carpenter to electrician. In addition, he also renewed BEA's accreditation and submitted all of our certificates to the Ministry of Education for signing. As for myself, I've been drowning in the usual paperwork dealing with all the teaching schedules, curriculum revisions, administrative training and inventory. Nevertheless, everyone and everything has come together for our first day of classes!

The Big Move
Our unexpected move was a big shock for us – our landlord had promised to renew out rental agreement the month before, but then went back on his work and told us we had one month to leave our building! Fortunately, Shally was able to find a similar building for us. We were quite lucky since “corner” lots are hard to come by in Borey Bremey – a small neighborhood with apartment complexes just on the outskirts of Trapeang Sess Village. We needed to stay in the same area since most of the BEA kids live in the nearby village. The total cost of the move was just under $2500 US – money we didn’t have. Fortunately, my parents, David and Zaiga Dewar, donated this amount so that we’d have enough for our three months deposit. We were paying $340 US in our old building, but rent prices have gone up over the past three years, so we now are paying $400 US in our new building. As usual, the BEA kids were a great help in getting us settled in. Many of our kids have shown up these past few weeks to help with cleaning and decorating.

The New Classroom
Although it’s a bit of a financial risk, we’ve decided to expand the number of courses we offer at BEA. Sarith, one of our English language instructors, will have a full-course load this year. She went through my intensive one-month teacher training program in February-March 2013 and then on-the-job training with Shally for six months with our Pre-Intermediate English language course during the 2012-13 school year. Now, she’s ready for three courses on her own. She’ll be teaching the Basic and Pre-Intermediate course, and in charge of 86 students. Nevertheless, I’ll be in her classroom for team teaching sessions before I head back to Japan at the end of September. Afterwards, Shally will take over team teaching with her until the start of January. Shally, as usual, is in charge of daily operations, managing staff, student counseling, and teaching the Intermediate and Advanced courses.

Registration
Since we expanded the number of courses this school year, we ran a two-day registration from August 30-31 to handle the additional applicants. This year’s registration was definitely the smoothest one to date. We’ve definitely learnt a lot from our past three registrations. This year we spent more time screening the applicants to make sure that they did indeed come from backgrounds of extreme or moderate poverty, which means that their parents’ monthly income is less than $80 US. There were a few parents from wealthy families who showed up and demanded that we take their children. Despite explaining our mission and recommending other schools, one parent even said “Why should I pay when I can get it for free from an NGO.” To put it in more relevant terms, it would be similar to giving food stamps to someone who makes $100 000 US per year!!!

Despite the half-day power outage on the first day of registration, we were able to register a total of 137 students for the 2013-14 school year!

In just a few hours, we’ll be welcoming our new and returning students to their first day of classes at BEA! Once again, I’m hoping for organized chaos rather than complete madness…and, of course, for the power to stay on this afternoon.

Into the new school year!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education with professional teachers in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Certificates are done!

30/8/2013

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The BEA directors have finally finished printing and signing the 2012-13 school year certificates. Tomorrow, they'll be given to the Minister of Education for his signature as well. The BEA kids will then have a small graduation ceremony once registration for 2013-14 finishes after this weekend! The BEA English language course certificates are actually equivalent to those issued at the high school level in Cambodia!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education with professional teachers in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Last Day of the 1st Semester 2012

16/2/2012

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Hi everyone,

We finished up our last teaching day for the first semester of the 2011-12 school year, and we all made it through the 104 teaching days! The BEA kids will be on their "spring" vacation for the next three weeks while Shally and I head to Phnom Penh for the CamTESOL conference, and then start revising the curriculum for the second semester and taking care of building repairs. The break will still keep both of us quite busy.

Awards Ceremony:
One of the traditions we've started at BEA is to hold a small awards ceremony on the last day of the first semester. Student who received top marks in their courses, as well as those with perfect attendance, are presented with prizes for their outstanding effort during the semester, such as dictionaries and notebooks. However, we had to expand our prize pool to include grammar textbooks and graded readers The reason is that some students in their courses last year placed in the top three, and had already had dictionaries. In total, we gave out 20 prizes this semester. I'm still amazed that six of the BEA kids got perfect attendance prizes, especially since they go to public school, work part-time and have household responsibilities. Such dedication and determination for such young adults. I've never been prouder of them, and especially proud of Shally. Despite the endless challenges he has to go through each and every day, he's been an incredible inspiration for the BEA kids, and to me as well. At times, there is just so much despair in this job, but days like today really make up for all those tears.

Graduation Ceremony:
At the end of our awards ceremony, we also had our certificate ceremony for those students who passed their courses for the 2010-11 school year. BEA received accreditation as an educational institutions from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) and the Ministry of Interior last year in August, which means we can issue our own certificates for our English language and teacher training programs. There's always a waiting period for government-approved certificates, but we finally got them! The BEA kids were just beaming when they got their certificates. They put in an incredible amount of work to pass their course, so their certificate really means something to them. I had no trouble at all getting them to smile for their photos with Shally.

CamTESOL:
Now that we're on a break, I have time to starting preparing our presentation for the CamTESOL conference next week. The CamTESOL conference series started in 2005, and is an international conference to foster the professional development of English language teachers in Cambodia. The theme of this year's conference is Language and Development, and will be held on February 25-26 with over 350 invited speakers.

Rather than doing individual workshops as we did last year, Shally and I will be presenting a paper together on BEA's curriculum. In our presentation, we will explain how to adapt the Communicative Approach (CA) and Task-Based Learning (TBL) in the Cambodian classroom. Both of these are different types of teaching methodologies used in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Before we head to Phnom Penh, I'll upload our presentation to the website. I'm also hoping to get this paper published in one of the bigger journals on teaching EFL in Asia.

Onwards to CamTESOL...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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August News

26/8/2011

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Hi everyone,

We're back after a short summer break! Well, actually, it hasn't been a break for Shally and I because we've been dealing with administrative and technical matters for the entire month. Regardless, we have some great news to share with you.

Accreditation:
First of all, we are incredibly happy to announce that BEA has received accreditation from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MOEYS) as an official academic institution in Cambodia. This is a huge step forward for BEA because it means we can now issue our own certificates for our programs. Students will then get more recognition for all their hard work, which in turn, will help them have a better chance of getting a good job since they have an official certificate proving their skills.

Furthermore, this will hopefully give us greater access to funding opportunities as an accredited educational institution. Many of the larger grant applications often require schools to issue certificates, so we now can apply for these types of grants.

At the moment, we are finishing up the design of our certificate. Once that is done, the Deputy Minister just has to sign-off on the design, and we can award certificates to students who went through the 2010-11 BEA program.

If you're interested, you can see our certificate design at the end of this posting.

Curriculum Revisions and New Course:
We're also revising our Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses from the 2010-11 school year. Shally and I spent about a week discussing and making changes to the different parts of our programs. The major changes that we'll be making to our program will include:
(1) having one-week for conducting the written and speaking tests during the semester;
(2) having one-week to complete and present task-based learning projects;
(3) decreasing semester tests from three small ones to two large ones;
(4) decreasing task-based learning projects from three to two during each semester;
(5) and introducing TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) at the beginning of semester 1 and at the end of semester 2;
(6) and adding an Intermediate language program, which means we'll be offering four courses now (Basic, Pre-Intermeidate A, Pre-Intermediate B, and Intermediate)

The reasons for decreasing some of the course work was to give the students more time to work on their project, and to also give Shally more time to evaluate students' speaking abilities. Since I am starting to write up formal research paper this year, we also needed to measure the students' abilities compared to international averages, so this was the reasoning behind introducing the TOEIC test. For the teachers out there, don't worry, we definitely won't be "teaching towards the test". We just need international accredited test scores so that we can show that our program actually contributes to improving the English language abilities of our students.

Donation from David and Zaiga Dewar:
Finally, my father emailed last night to tell me that he and my mother had just sent a donation to our school's bank account for $2500US. This came as such a surprise, and as a welcome relief! We had only enough funds to cover BEA until the end of September, so now we're covered until the end of November. Thank you so much!!!!

As usual, there is always much more I can write about, but I'll save it for the upcoming week.

Back to the books....

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

P.S. Below you can see the frame of our certificates!

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<<Previous

Teacher Training Highlights: Group Teaching Practices

Prizes for the Best and the Brightest BEA Kids

Certificate Ceremony 2013-14

Calm Before the Storm

Candid Shots from BEA's 2012-13 Certificate Ceremony

Ready for Graduation!

Ready for the Big Day

Certificates are done!

Last Day of the 1st Semester 2012

August News

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