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 [...]

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 [...]

Students at Guan Ai take exams twice a semester, a mock at half-term and a real one at the end of term. While these exams do a decent job of tracking progress of students, they do have their inadequacies. Much of the content on the exams can be mastered by repeating similar questions ad nauseum [...]

In the previous post, I wrote about how RCEF designed special tests in Math, Science, English, Language Arts, and Social Studies for students. Our goal was to measure their skills beyond the textbook. Below are some examples of questions from the Social Studies test. What do you think is the most important of China’s ancient [...]

Historically, education in China has been very exam oriented. In the past, the main goal of many scholars was to pass the imperial exam, which would allow them to become civil servants. Nowadays, schools and teachers have their eyes on the university entrance exams （高考）. This focus on exams starts at first grade, or even [...]

Ron Sung is a full-time Teaching Coach at Guan Ai School. He is from the United States and earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduation he held a position as a middle school math teacher in Oakland before deciding to join RCEF. He now works with the Science and [...]

When I was a teacher in California, I once went to a quick workshop about Bizworld, and I thought it was the coolest teaching ever! Bizworld is a program or toolkit that introduces the concept of entrepreneurship to students in primary school and even secondary school. I thought students at Guan Ai would definitely enjoy [...]

Chinese kids don’t really play board games like American kids do, but like any game you introduce to kids, they pick up quickly, especially if you play the game in class. Little did they know they were actually reviewing math skills for their end of semester test that was coming up. The other function of [...]