Teacher professional development: The Shanghai model 教师专业发展的上海模式: 来自上海进城务工人员随迁子女学校的数据报告

• In Event: Chinese roundtable II (Sponsored by SIG: East Asia)
  In Chinese Round-table Session: Teacher professional development: the Shanghai model 教师专业发展的上海模式

Proposal

With China’s dramatic economic development over the last three decades, a great number of rural labors have moved to the major urban cities with their children, which has brought about huge challenges to the Chinese education system. As an economic leader in China, Shanghai is one of those experiencing the most pressure. While providing equal educational opportunity to migrant children, in recent years, increased attention has been paid to the improvement of teaching quality in migrant schools. In this scenario, an expert team from the East China Normal University has undertaken an intervention project of teacher in-service training to promote the mode of ‘participatory teaching and learning’ (canyushi jiaoxue) in migrant schools of the M District since 2015.

This project was designed mainly in the light of the ideas of inclusive education. Over the last three years, a specific focus has been put on the implementation of children-centered education by means of ‘participatory teaching and learning’. To be concrete, this project aims to enhance teachers’ awareness of protecting children’s rights and cultivating children’s democratic participating capability. With regard to teaching, it assists teachers to shift the pedagogical mode from transmitting knowledge to constructing knowledge and change the role of pupils from passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in learning.

Drawing upon the data collected from the participating schools in early 2018, this study interrogates whether the intervention project has led to substantial changes in classes and, if so, how the teaching and learning have changed. It also aims to identify challenges and problems emerged in the processes and, on this basis, to formulate the future plan for teacher professional development in migrant schools. We carried out observation of 14 classrooms in seven schools, including lessons on the subjects of Chinese, English, and maths, and made a comparison with the contrast data collected before the project. The finding shows that teachers in the examined migrant schools have widely accepted the concepts of participatory teaching and children-centered education. During the project, three approaches to teaching and learning have been adopted, namely, autonomous and cooperative learning (zizhu yu hezuo xuexi), learning through questioning (wenti xuexi), and learning based on games (youxi xuexi). In order to improve teachers’ professional capabilities, efforts have also been made to introduce a training mechanism that combines reflective individual learning, collaborative research and the network of sharing. All these have resulted in the transition of teachers’ professional knowledge in three aspects: from theoretical to practical, from tactic to explicit, and from individual to shared.

Author

• Zhongjing Huang, East China Normal University