Improving Physics Education in Cambodia: Beyond the Workshop

Last week we’ve been organizing a workshop on physics education for lower secondary teacher trainers in Cambodia at the regional teacher training centre in Kandal province.  All Cambodian physics teacher trainers were present.  That makes around 20 people.  The workshop lasted 5 days.   Each day we discussed a different part from the curriculum.  There were days we focused on sound, mechanics, pressure, optics and electricity and magnetism.  The last day participants collaboratively made a lesson plan using materials they’d learned.   There was a strong emphasis on low-cost experiments, but there’s also attention for simulations and animations, and student-centred approaches.

The underlying concept of the workshop – and actually the whole programme – is the TPACK concept (Mishra and Koehler,2006; Koehler and Mishra, 2007; Abbitt, 2011), an extension of Shulman’s idea of pedagogical content knowledge, this is knowledge of pedagogy that is applicable to the teaching of specific content.  

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