Teacher Profile: Than Than Khaing

Than Than Khaing, a lantern of Shwe Bone Thar Monastic Education School, completed her Cohort training and joined the Studer Trust Teacher Training Center (TTC) in 2015. Being a mother and a teacher has its perks and shortcomings. She can learn more about the behavior of kids from her son, but she can't join long term trainings, such as Studer Trust's English Teacher Training or Advanced Teacher Training, as she needs to give time for her baby son. But she loves to learn new things for her students, and the TTC’s summer workshops are the only training that fits her tight schedule. She attended the summer workshops yearly and was looking forward to learning new things this year. This year, Studer Trust had to adapt to the situation and came up with the idea to conduct a Summer Online Course. For Ma Than Than Khaing, it was a challenge. She is not familiar with modern technology, and was a bit wary of attending a digital course. This concern became a reality when she wasn’t able to navigate participating in the SOC Facebook group. Like many of us, Ma Than Than Khaing isn’t an expert in all the ins and outs of Facebook. This was particularly true when it came to joining and participating in “Groups”. Groups, for readers that are equally unfamiliar, are pages on Facebook that allow for private discussion and sharing of information. They were a perfect venue for the SOC to disseminate information and course videos, collect assignments, and respond to questions and comments for all participants to see.

The first challenge for Ma Than Than Khaing came in joining the group. The trainers had sent her an invite, but the invite came in a section of Facebook she didn’t often look at. After a few additional invites and helpful calls with the trainers and participants, she successfully found and joined the group. Then came the next obstacle: submitting assignments. She started by submitting her assignments page by page as separate comments rather than all in one. This became an issue when other students submitted in between her submissions, meaning her assignment pages were separated and hard for the trainers to review. Once again, she felt comfortable coming to the trainers with this concern, who in turn kindly helped her learn how to combine and post all pages at once. In the end, Ma Than Than Khain successfully completed the SOC, thanks to the support of trainers and trainees. Now, Than Than Khaing is interested in crafting Teaching Learning Aids after taking the lessons from SOC and is also continuing to improve her technological prowess but beginning basic computer lessons. She will share the knowledge about lesson planning and teaching styles she learned from SOC to her associates, also encouraging them to take the workshops. She is more confident and eager than ever to take more summer workshops from Studer Trust.