A TEFL and TESOL course in Chiang Mai, run by two people who teach in Thai classrooms — one American, one Thai. You will stand in front of actual learners, be watched, and be told the truth about it.
No degree? Read the next section before you spend a baht. We take trainees without degrees, and we will not pretend that changes Thai immigration law.
January 2027 is our first course. There are no graduates yet, no testimonials, and no wall of logos. If that matters to you, wait for the second one — that is a reasonable thing to do and we will not argue.
What we can tell you is what is in it, who is teaching it, and what it will and will not get you. Everything on this page is the truth as it stands today. Where something is not decided yet, it says so rather than being left vague.
One thing we will do differently from the start: we tell you the truth about the degree requirement, even when it costs us the sale. That is the whole section below, and it is the reason to trust anything else on this page.
This site is one of five run by the same family: ESLteacher.com for free classroom worksheets, EnglishTeacher.com for pronunciation practice and a Thai–English dictionary, USAEnglish.com · USAEnglishTeacher.com for the Isan storytelling competition, and Ploy.com. All free, all still free.
This is the part that matters, and the part a cheap online certificate cannot give you. You will plan lessons, teach them to actual Thai students, be observed, and get feedback you can use the next morning. Not peer teaching to other trainees pretending to be children. Real learners, in a real room.
Why this decides everything. Anyone can sell you 120 hours of video and a PDF certificate. What a school actually wants to know is whether you have stood in front of forty children and held the room. A course without observed practice cannot tell them, and it cannot tell you — plenty of people find out in week one of a real job that they hate it, and that is an expensive place to find out.
Not a European language school with twelve motivated adults. A Thai government classroom: forty to fifty children, one board, no printer some weeks, a mixed ability range of three years inside one room, and a curriculum you do not choose. We teach to that.
Course length, contact hours, price, class size and the exact venue are being settled now. We will publish them here as soon as they are fixed, well before anyone is asked for money. If you want them emailed to you the moment they are, put your name down below.
Thai. Born and raised in a village outside Surin, in Isan, in a family that spoke Isan Lao and Thai at home. She taught herself English from cassette tapes from the age of nine, and in 2010 she stood up at Ban Han Hee School in Rattanaburi and told a story in English well enough to win gold.
She teaches Thai children English for a living. She knows what a Thai classroom expects of a teacher, what a Thai parent expects, and exactly how it feels to know hundreds of English words and freeze when you have to say one out loud.
American. Volunteer English teacher at Ban Han Hee School, Rattanaburi district, Surin. He built the free tools on the four sister sites because the ones that existed were made for classrooms that look nothing like the ones here.
He takes the trainee calls himself — before you enrol, and after.
One Thai teacher and one foreign teacher, on purpose. Most of what goes wrong for a new foreign teacher in Thailand is not language teaching. It is not understanding the room. Half of this course is taught by somebody who grew up in it.
Most TEFL schools avoid this question because the honest answer costs them sales. Here it is.
A bachelor's degree — in any subject — is required for a teacher work permit in Thailand. A TEFL or TESOL certificate does not replace it, and no course, ours included, can change that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either mistaken or selling you something.
If a school offers you classroom work without a degree, be careful. It usually means no work permit, which means you are working illegally, on someone else's decision, with the risk landing entirely on you. That is a bad trade however good the school seems.
Because a degree is not the only door, and because the people who ask us this question are usually already doing one of these things, or about to.
If you come to us without a degree, we will say all of the above to your face, on a call, before you pay anything. If your plan depends on walking into a Thai government classroom on a work permit next term, we will tell you it will not work and we will not take your money.
We would rather lose the fee than have you find out in Bangkok.
Before you spend money on any course, including ours, know what the job legally needs. Rules change — treat this as the checklist to ask about, and confirm the current position with the Thai embassy in your country, the Immigration Bureau and the Ministry of Labour.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| A bachelor's degree, in any subject | Generally required for a work permit as a teacher. The original certificate and transcripts are usually needed, not copies. |
| A TEFL or TESOL certificate, usually 120 hours | What most schools ask for. A course with an in-class component is worth more than one without, and some employers say so explicitly. |
| A criminal background check from your home country | Often needs legalising. It is slow. Start it early. |
| A Non-Immigrant B visa and a work permit | Arranged with the school. Never start work on a tourist visa on a promise that it will be sorted later. |
| A Teachers' Council (Kurusapha) licence or waiver | Schools normally handle the waiver. Ask who is paying for it and who is doing the paperwork. |
The full checklist, including the order things actually happen in and the questions to put to a school in writing, is free on our sister site: the visa and work permit checklist at ESLteacher.com. So is a guide to your first week in a Thai school. You do not need to buy anything to read either.
TEFL training is a lightly regulated industry with a lot of bad actors in it. Here is what we would ask, and you should ask us all of it too.
Our answer to number seven: we do not guarantee you a job, and we take no fee from any school for sending you to it. We do run a free Thailand job board and we will go through any advert with you for fifteen minutes, whether you took our course or not. That offer is here.
No deposit, no commitment. You get an email when the price, the dates and the course length are fixed, and nothing else.
Tell us where you are now, whether you already have a degree, and what is making you consider teaching in Thailand. Ben reads these himself and will answer.
That opens an email to hello@tesolteacher.com with a few questions in it. We do not sell or share your details, and we will not add you to anything you did not ask for.