A PBL-based Professional Development Framework to Incorporating Vocational Teachers in Thailand: Perceptions and Guidelines from Training Workshop

Abstract

Vocational education and training have become significant in developing the country in various aspects. Thailand has emphasized on improving the quality of vocational education with the promotion of ICT to support the teaching and learning. However, vocational teachers are limited with the knowledge, skills, and confidence in using technology in their classroom, making their students’ learning unmotivated and unengaged to the learning. Therefore, this study proposes a novel framework to developing the vocational teaching with the use of ICT support. The framework aims to make the vocational teachers skillful with TPACK in serving 21st-century education. Thus, this framework is integrated into the training workshop basing on project-based learning strategy, starting from considering actual teaching context, planning and finding solutions to address the need-to-be-enhanced learning topics in particular situations, applying learning technologies to support and motivate teaching and learning, to creating instructional activities. Furthermore, an experiment to investigate the perceptions and feedbacks towards the proposed framework was conducted with the vocational teachers in a training workshop. The findings show that the framework could help increase the vocational teachers’ perceptions on using ICT for teaching on confidence in using ICT for teaching and ease of use the ICT to assist teaching. Moreover, the teachers provide qualitative perspective in using ICT and suggestions for the institution. In addition, a proposal of practical guidelines and suggestions on vocational teachers’ development in Thailand with ICT has been proposed.