Competency-Building with Caveats: “Dual-Teacher Classrooms” and the Professional Lives of Rural-Site Teachers in a Yunnan Middle School

• In Event: Education at the Margins: Education for Social Equity for Children from Marginalized Communities in China

Proposal

MOTIVATION
The “dual-teacher classroom” model in rural education in China involves online expert teachers in urban schools delivering lectures to rural classrooms via live or recorded broadcasts, in partnership with rural-site teachers who supervise, manage and counsel students. This approach has been adopted in some rural and ethnic minority areas and has attracted widespread attention in the education sector. Yet, the full implications of dual-teacher classrooms for rural-site teachers' professional development are poorly understood.

This paper draws on a case study of a middle school in an ethnic minority area in Yunnan Province to address the question, what are the implications of the dual-teacher classroom model for rural-site teachers' professional development? The school is located in a mountainous location and serves students from remote, rural, and ethnic minority areas. It is a state-run public boarding school that has faced challenges in retaining teachers and providing high quality pedagogy. In these ways, the circumstances of this case study school are illustrative of issues facing many disadvantaged schools serving rural and ethnic minority populations in China. Data come from questionnaires, interviews, and observations.

The case study school was an early adopter of the dual-teacher classroom experiment. In 2014, in order to alleviate a shortage of teachers brought about by school consolidations, the case study school paired with an urban middle school with an online arm in a provincial capital city in a neighboring province to set up a full-time satellite live class for arts and sciences. At the time of data collection for this study, most of the teachers in the live class had implemented more than one round of live teaching. We believe that insights drawn from this case study school can provide a sound basis for generating research questions for subsequent research on this teaching model in rural China.

IMPLEMENTATION OF DUAL-TEACHER CLASSROOMS
The dual-teacher classroom uses satellite transmission, with the satellite network as the main source and the Internet as a supplement. Teachers at both ends communicate with each other through WeChat, QQ and other means of communication. One principle of the model in this school is known as the "four simultaneities,” which refers to the notion that rural-site teachers and students and urban-site teachers and students should have 1) simultaneous preparation, 2) simultaneous teaching, 3) simultaneous homework, and 4) simultaneous examination. Rural- and urban-site teachers meet once a week at the same time to prepare the lessons and jointly analyze key teaching points and discuss pedagogy. Moreover, the rural- and urban-site students experience a unified schedule of lessons, work, and rest time, complete the same homework at the same time, and sit for the same examination paper at the same time. The “four simultaneities” principle seeks to break spatial limitations, so that students from remote schools thousands of miles away can learn as if in the urban-site environment and “become” part of the urban-site school.

A second principle of the model in this school is known as “four-in-one” and refers to a division of labor: 1) The class lecturer is an expert teacher from the urban-site school who is responsible for teaching the rural-site students and synchronizing the content of the lecture to the remote school. This teacher becomes the lecturer of the rural-site school's live classroom. 2) The rural-site teacher becomes the tutor of the live classroom of the rural-site school, which is also the main object of the study. 3) The “gatekeeper teacher” is a senior teacher at the urban-site school who is responsible for operational guidance, pedagogical supervision, and gatekeeping for the lecturers to ensure high quality lecturing. Finally, 4) The technical staff are professional technicians from the online arm of the urban-site school and based at the rural-site school. They are responsible for technical support and equipment maintenance.

EMERGING FINDINGS
Rural-site teachers reported that the “four simultaneities” and “four-in-one” principles led to improved professional competence almost unconsciously via exposure to innovative teaching and classroom management strategies and during reflection on content and classroom innovation in their daily educational work. Importantly, rural-site teachers noticed that rural-site students did not always respond well to the urban-site streamed lessons. They reflected critically on how to reconfigure curriculum and pedagogy with attention to student needs, language, and culture in the region in which the school was located. Finally, rural-site teachers as a matter of necessity developed new skills to combine an intense streaming class with their own classroom activities.

Yet, rural-site teachers were not fully satisfied with the implementation of the dual-teacher classroom. Two related concerns emerged: de-professionalization and demoralization. De-professionalization occurred because rural-site teachers were pushed from being primary instructors into the role of “coach” or even “dispensable bystander.” This shift challenged the traditional status of rural-site teachers and brought about a sense of discomfort, loss, and anxiety. In this way, the dual-teacher classroom model eroded teachers' enthusiasm for teaching. This development is concerning, given the known difficulty in retaining teaching staff in remote, rural, and minority-serving schools.

The second phenomenon reported by rural-site teachers was feeling demoralized. The dual career classroom challenged rural-site teachers' sense of self-identity and self-worth. The dual classroom model disrupted emotional bonds between rural-site teachers and students, as students began to have a stronger emotional connection to online teachers and came to recognize the online teachers as their “real” teachers. In addition, some students came to lose trust in rural-site teachers, and teachers and students became alienated or even fractured by their psychological distance. Finally, positive student outcomes were almost always attributed to urban-site teachers, while the work of rural-site teachers was ignored or even erased. In these ways, the dual-classroom model detracted from rural-site teachers’ sense of personal value and achievement. Rural-site teachers became demoralized as their desire to be needed, recognized, and respected was eroded by the dual classroom model.

Authors

• Zhiyong Zhong, The Population Studies Center

• Emily Hannum, University of Pennsylvania

• Tanja Carmel Sargent, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education