Sharing Our Experiences with Cambodian Teachers at a Professional Development Event in Phnom Penh

Teachers around the world face many challenges each day. Cambodian teachers, in particular, are faced with some serious challenges such as:

  - A massive shortage of teachers in remote regions forcing existing staff to teach double shifts ( both morning and afternoon ) leading to extreme burnout.

  - Attraction and retention issues: Low pay and inadequate incentives fail to attract high quality candidates and result in low retention rates

  - Difficult working conditions and low resources

  - Inadequate training and professional development

 

As a former educator, I totally understand the challenges facing the Cambodian teachers and appreciate how difficult their jos are. Though there are not much I can do to help them with the shortage of teachers, their low pay and working conditions etc., I can ertainly help out in the area of teacher training and professional development. We are grateful to God that both my husband and I are healthy and mobile enabling our travel to Cambodia and to share our experiences with some of the local teachers there.

There was a lot of planning on the schools' part to organize the full day professional develpment event for their teachers. The students would need to stay home for the day in order to free the teachers attending the training. Our presentations delivered in English, needed to be intrepreted in Khmer so that the Cambodian teachers could fully understand them.

 In order to make our presentations easier to understand, we broke up the contents into four modules and included a few interactive activities. We also arranged the group of 35 teachers including primary and elementary schools, into six smaller groups for discussions enabling the teachers to get to know each other and providing them more time for sharing. According to the teachers' positive feedback and participation, they seemed to have enjoyed and learned a few strategies from this professional development day. This made us very happy and we felt that our work and preparations were well worth it!

  We thank God for a productive and fruitful day! If God is willing, we will see the teachers again next year as we have already received a verbal invitation from the school!

  RT, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 01, 2026