The implications of the tailoring workshop for teachers’ sustainable development: A case study of a middle school in Shanghai 定制式工作坊在教师持续发展中的作用：以上海市某中学为例

• 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

On the basis of the teaching-research system, the tailoring workshop (dingzhishi gongzuofang) has been developed in recent years to better focus on individual teachers’ specific needs, improve their problem-solving ability, and facilitate inter-subject collaboration. X school, as focused in this study, is one of a few schools in Shanghai that has spearheaded this experiment. While X school had occasionally conducted the tailoring workshop, in 2016, I was invited to give a series of lecture with regard to the design and organization of the workshop and consulted about how to systematically and efficiently carry out workshop activities. After two years, I returned to X school to evaluate the implementation and effect of this project. In this context, this paper aims to provide an overview of this school-based in-service teacher training project, review the employed methods and the process of activities, and reflect upon the experience and problems derived from the practice and the implication for the sustainable development of teachers.

Over the past two years, workshops have been undertaken every two weeks and in which about 80% teachers from all compulsory subjects have been actively involved. The data for this study was mainly collected from three sources: (1) the plans and records of workshops, teachers’ reflection notes and casebooks; (2) field observation records; and (3) semi-structured group and individual interviews with 20 teachers. Together, these three sources of data combined to offer a detailed and balanced portrayal of how the workshops were conducted, and whether they influenced teachers’ daily teaching, if so, to what the extent and in which aspects. The data was analyzed in the light of John Dewey’s pragmatic theory.

Drawing from the data, it can be seen that, in spite of various forms, the process of the tailoring workshop in X school can be generally divided into four steps: (1) participating teachers put forward issues that they encounter at work and form research questions; (2) according to varied interest and needs, teachers voluntarily team up as research groups; (3) in each team, teachers fully discuss the focused issue, undertake independent research, come up with some possible solutions and write case reports; and (4) during the sharing and reflection time, teachers are given the chance to summarize and exchange their research experiences.

This paper argues that, unlike the traditional ‘top-down’ approach, this school-based training project has considerably emphasized the role of teachers. In other words, central to the workshop is teachers’ real needs, instead of theoretical assumptions; the professional development of teachers emerges out of their life experience. Moreover, not just solving practical problems, the workshop also encourages and enables teachers to persistently identify problems and commit to research, which in turn improves their teaching ability and cultivate their consciousness of issue while teaching. This is significantly different from and, according to the data of this study, better than the traditional approaches to teacher professional development in reliance on lectures and the observation of demonstrative lessons.

Author

• Yucui Ju, East China Normal University