The RCEF Blog 博客

This post was written by Xiaochun Li, a first grade teacher at Guan Ai Primary School. She is part of a team of teachers and RCEF staff who work on the library and reading program at the school. 以下的博客是关爱小学的李晓春老师写的。她是学校图书和阅读项目的一名负责人。 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2009年11月19日孙传美老师.小朝学校的尚好看老师.和我三个人,一行去了杭州,这是我第一次带着学校的期望与任务参加了这次会议,我既感到兴奋又感到责任重大,同时我对这次会议也抱有很大的期望.

在这次的回忆中我接触了一个新鲜的东西: 班级读书会,这是我们关爱学校乃至于整个山西所没有接触过的一种新型的阅读讨论形式，会议中展示了三种不同的班级读书会的形式与样本，使我们对班级读书会这个新的概念有了一个大致的认识与了解，但是在专家的解说与自我感觉中，班级读书会还可能有其他多种形式，在这里只是展示了三种:阅读前的阅读推荐班级读书会(学生对所推荐的这本书一无所知,老师通过让学生看书的封面或读书中的精彩片段或者是让学生读梗概等方式让学生猜测与预测这本书的内容,从而感染学生的阅读兴趣);\阅读后的读书分享讨论班级读书会(学生已经读了这本书,然后让学生重新回到这本书上,老师采用阅读情节单,角色日志,心情日志等来共同分享这本书);\阅读后的对比阅读班级读书会(这中形式也属于阅读后分享讨论会,只是这 Read the rest of this post

Students examine a honey comb

Guan Ai has a group of very inquisitive and energetic fifth grade boys. Last semester, they took an interest in the bees which buzzed around the school yard and crawled around water droplets on the faucets. For several days in a row, one or more of these boys would rush into the RCEF office, exuberant, bearing the latest live specimens they had captured and put in “habitats” fashioned out of discarded bottles, tape and wooden chopsticks. “What kind of bee is this?” they wanted to know. “Is this a wasp or a bee? How can we keep it alive?” Seeing that their curiosity was not just a passing fad, we decided to take the students to learn from real beekeepers. Utilizing the recess time before dinner, we walked through the fields to a village about fifteen minutes away where an elderly couple raised bees in their backyard. Read the rest of this post

Emcee demonstrates how to deliver lines with emotion.

Seven teachers from the Yuncheng Preschool Normal School came to visit Guan Ai School on September 27th. (A “Normal School” means a school that trains teachers, in this case to teach in preschools.) They included several artists, a calligrapher, a singer and a professional emcee. The guests went to different classes to teach students about their own artforms. The artists demonstrated to the fourth and sixth graders how to draw portraits using Kiel as a model, the calligrapher taught the fifth graders techniques for writting different strokes and words, and the emcee taught students how to recite passages and poems with emotion. The calligrapher also wrote beautiful banners for the school, the teachers’ office and the library.

Artist draws a portrait as students gather around.

Calligrapher made signs for the school.

Developing and teaching a bookmaking class at Guan Ai School this past summer was an incredibly rewarding

Students hold up their finished books.

experience for me. I love teaching and took advantage of the summer vacation to develop a ten day activity class at the school. Though I developed the curriculum, most important to the class was my partnership with two local Guan Ai teachers: Ms. Xie and Principal Sun.

I have learned through previous work in America and China that education is a truly collaborative experience. It is really a game of constant adjustment as you and your partners try to find how to apply an idea on paper to the reality of twenty young minds sitting before you in a classroom. Because of this you are only as good as the people you work with, and I was fortunate to work with two talented teachers who were eager to give suggestions and to share their expertise. This is especially important to me since I am a foreigner in China who is using my ideas to teach a class abroad. I find that when working with Chinese teachers and students, it is always so interesting (and sometimes a bit frustrating) to discover the new ways of thinking that they share. Read the rest of this post

Volunteers served as nature camp counselors.

In the mountains of Miyun County outside of Beijing, there is a nature retreat which serves as the base of operations for the Peasant’s Children Cultural Development Center, a NGO that pioneers nature education in China. Every summer a group of children from the dusty, crowded migrant neighborhoods in Beijing get to go to this retreat for a week-long nature camp. RCEF provided funding for some of their camp counselors this year. These counselors were undergraduate volunteers, hailing from Shanxi Agricultural University. Below is a report from their team leader, Zuo Xiaoxia.

2009年北京农民之子夏令营总结——左晓霞

其实这次在北京呆了好久，参加的活动有20天简单生活营，7天（拜访美新路基金会，2天家访和社区调查），7天夏令营活动，很多感受是无法用总结全部表达出来，各个活动在内心感觉到并在行动上受到的影响是交叉渗透在一起的，有些是需要慢慢沉淀，整理的，但同时由于需要，我先就夏令营说吧！

1. 与孩子的关系：
参加夏令营的是来自北京打工子弟学校（树仁学校，白庙学校，智泉学校）的小学生们，总共28人，辅导员和辅导员助手10人，工作组2人，两个辅导员带一组，共五组，每组带的部分孩子辅导员已在家访中了解孩子家庭情况以及孩子的一些基本情况，以便于七天与孩子能有一个很好的交流。 Read the rest of this post

RCEF differs from lots of education-focused NGOs in that we primarily offer not material support such as desks, blackboards and the like, but instead provide long-term teacher training. As part of this ongoing effort just before the new semester began we conducted a training at Guan Ai Primary School for the existing and newly incoming teachers.

As a teaching coach the past year I took part in the mathematics lesson planning session. All mathematics teachers gathered in our library, where Executive Director of Programs Sara Lam outlined what things we’re looking for when writing lesson plans. These include:

• Introducing the topic in a fresh and interesting way
• Connecting the subject matter to real life
• Making connections with previously taught classes
• Multidisciplinary methods

Thereafter new teaching coach Wang Jianhua utilized a spidergram technique to illustrate how a unit can be structured. The exercise involved started by brainstorming everything do to with that unit: topics, techniques needed, new concepts and vocabulary. Once that was done teachers were asked to connect the ‘modules’ of information that were related. In this way it became much clearer what the individual lessons that make up the unit would contain. It was an innovative and very useful exercise, as I’m sure our teachers would agree, and you can read one teachers’ opinion here.

Teachers then broke up in to groups of two based on grade levels (so grade one and two teachers worked together) and chose units from last year’s textbooks to plan using this methodology. This went very well, with a few teachers coming up with some very creative ideas to introduce topics and use activities that would be likely to enthuse students about the material.

I dare say this year’s crop of maths teachers is better than last years, for two reasons: Firstly, the teachers from last year are one year more experienced and are now more comfortable using student-centered teaching methods. For many this has become their “default” mode of instruction, which is wonderful and, personally, as a teaching coach, richly rewarding. The second reason is that we’ve been selective with regards to recruiting new teachers. They are diligent and open-minded, which should make introducing even more reforms in the mathematics pedagogy easier.

This year will be a good one I think.

First grade maths teacher Ms. Li Xiaochun

Xiaochun Li is a teacher at Guan Ai Primary School. She is in her early 20s and has taught for a few years. Last year she taught second grade math and this year she is teaching first grade. RCEF organized a training for teachers before school started this year. It involved teachers analyzing the curriculum for the semester and preparing lesson plans. Below is Ms. Li’s description of the process.

李晓春老师是关爱小学的老师。她很年轻，只有二十多岁, 但很有教学创新和上进精神。她去年教了二年级数学，今年教的是一年级。开学前，乡村教育促进会组织了一个老师培训。老师集体分析了课程并且开始备课。以下是李老师对这个过程的描述。

改革开放20多年以来，我国在经济上取得飞速发展的同时，教育事业也取得了举世瞩目的发展。然而，正如绝大多数发展中国家一样，我国也面临这样一些问题。2000年，全国上下掀起了“课改的热潮”，我们也不例外也扬起了时代的风帆——课改。我们课改的主要方向是：以儿童为中心，以社区为本的教学。下面我主要谈谈我们在数学方面所作的改革：

我们打破了以往的以课本为标准，以教师为中心的教学思路，取而代之的是完全以儿童的认知结构为中心的一种新的教学思路，主要体现在备课上，主要包括以下几个方面：

1． 首先做备课：一个单元其实是一个大的知识结构，是把这个大的知识结构分成若干个小的部分，一部分一部分地完成，使学生能更容易接受，但是课本的编排有时候可能没有完全考虑到学生的认知结构，那怎么办呢？我们有办法：在开始一个新的知识结构之前，如在开始每一个新的单元之前，我们首先要做的是整体分析本单元的所有内容，列出本单元的所有知识、能力、情感目标，其次把这些目标按照儿童的认知能力进行融合、调整、编排，作出一个单元的知识结构图，再次通过这个单元结构图再做出更为细致的课堂活动安排，也就是一个完整的单元备课。 Read the rest of this post

A group photo from the Foxfire course

While visiting the United States this summer, Sara Lam and I had the opportunity to participate in a week-long training at the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Southern Appalachia. The center is located on Black Mountain in Mountain City, Georgia. Foxfire was originally the name of a class that was started in 1966 by a teacher at a nearby high school who experimented with different teaching methods in his English classes. His students began writing and publishing a magazine that included stories and information they collected from their communities. The magazine, also named Foxfire, was well received in Appalachia and the country at large and subsequent best-selling books were released cataloging articles from the magazine. Some of the royalties money was used to buy a large plot of land where the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center is now located, a decision made by students from the Foxfire classes.

While the Foxfire class and magazine continue to operate in a nearby school, Foxfire has become more than just a class for students. In the mid-1980s, the Foxfire team started teacher outreach programs to disseminate their methods to schools outside their region. They created training courses at their center for teachers and administrators to learn about the methods and theories behind their magazine class. Coupling the experiences from their classroom and the educational theories of John Dewey, they created a curriculum based around core practices. These practices promote the creation of student projects beyond the original magazine class to all different types of student-centered community projects.

Visiting the Foxfire Center and participating in the course was a hugely educational experience for us. The content of the course was especially relevant to our work because community service projects and community research are a large part of the curriculum we’ve been developing at Guan Ai Primary School this last year. We were able to use the time to reflect on our past projects in terms of the core practices developed at Foxfire in order to improve them and come up with new ideas for this year. Some of the core practices refer to areas that we need to improve on in our current community projects. For instance, in the Foxfire method on-going reflection, assessment and evaluation are very important. In the class we were given examples and materials that explain how this can be more fully integrated into a project.

In addition to the lessons on teaching methods, we also gained some valuable insights for RCEF as an organization that hopes to expand. The Foxfire approach was developed in a rural school and distributed successfully to diverse educational contexts, something that RCEF hopes to do in the future. They have forty years of experience on RCEF and myriad experiences and insights from going through the scaling up process. Thankfully, the organizers of the course were willing to adapt the structure of the class to allow us to learn more about the processes involved in building a national program out of Foxfire. This partnered with all of the new insights into teaching made it an incredibly valuable trip for RCEF.

View the rest of the post to see the Foxfire Core Practices.

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