Introduction to this Blog

My name is Paul Hancock. I am a retired British lawyer who retired to Northern Thailand in 2002 to reinvent myself for the next stage of my life. I live in Chiang Rai with my Canadian wife, Patricia. We set up a Thai foundation (Khom Loy Development Foundation, or KLDF) as the vehicle for our various projects.

The biggest and most durable project which has continued since 2004 is our "Low-cost Montessori for Poor Communities" project. Since 2004, we have converted 70+ schools in poor areas of north and west Thailand, and starting 2014, another 6 schools in Mawlamyine, Myanmar. We are about to embark on another 3 new rooms in Mawlamyine with our team of 5 Burmese teacher-trainers and a qualified Montessori trainer. 

In this blog, I want to talk about how we can create a scaleable and sustainable model for Montessori (MS) in this region and other areas of the developing world. 

At the moment, most of the people participating in this blog are all involved in one model or another to do this. However,  I don’t think we yet have the perfect answer. 

KLDF’s model of low-cost (locally made) materials and a 9 month in-class training period has been successful in some rooms in continuing for some years after we leave the room, but depends on us happening to find an exceptionally motivated teacher in place (which happens in 10-15% of rooms).

In rooms where we don’t find such a high level of motivation, the teachers tend to stop using the method some time after we leave, for such reasons as:

• one of the teachers we trains leaves
• he/she loses motivation
• there is a change of school head and the new head for some reason does not support the project

In order to minimize his “dropout rate”, we would need a full time person or team, going round the schools where we launched the initial program to keep up skills and motivation. This would be in addition to the team we need to keep identifying, surveying and training new schools to add to the network.

At present, KLDF's model is fairly resource intensive, and I do not think the Burmese or any other local government administration would have the resources to support a broad-based programme covering a substantial part of the country. ​

So the question arises: are there changes we can make to the model to increase the chance of the Montessori method (or some adaptation of it) being easier to introduce, and also to sustain after the initial period.

My ideas for discussion and reaction via this blog are:

• should we somehow scale down or simplify the system we are using? If we try to rank the desirable outcomes, maybe we should limit the programme to maths/literacy, or somehow drop other parts of our "full-line" method? (I think Doris Schaefer has a smaller set of materials she uses in the Lao schools.)
• should we make the teacher training more intensive, so that more of it "sticks"?
• do we need better or different training materials which teachers can refer to after we leave as a way of reinforcing their training?

​What other ideas to people have? Is there something successful being tried somewhere else which we should go an look at?

All ideas welcome!