The RCEF Blog 博客

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.

Be Sociable, Share!

•