This article is too short to really approach the question asked in its headline. Instead, we get a glimpse at Chinese teachers in British classrooms. The article's voice is a little unclear, but I guess it's written by one of the students.
Edit: I had trouble telling that each section was written by a different author.
>It is, however, abundantly clear to me that Chinese parents, culture and values are the real reasons that Shanghai Province tops the oft-cited Pisa tables rather than superior teaching practice.
Yes, there's a reason that the High Expectations Asian Father is a meme[1]. Even at home outside of school, the strict attitude of always being mindful of schooling was also made famous by the Tiger Mom author.[2]
When kids have 2 parents apply pressure like that, an inept high school football coach with a degree in General Studies could teach physics to Asian students and it wouldn't matter.
Funny. Some brits look up to the Chinese system to educate their kids, but come time for university and every single Chinese parent would rather their kid go the oxbridge route than any chinese school.
Perhaps this article should be more explicit in that it involves comparison between CHinese practices and those of a subset of British schools. I went to a british-style boys school, a rugby school. It was nothing like the one in this article. We did plenty of memorization. We paid attention and worked hard for many hours beyond what is expected of the kids in this article. By grade 12 I had actually read all the major Shakespeares, read them well enough to have opinions and write papers. (First year university was a total walk in comparison.) The brits need not go to china for inspiration.
Was it St. Bede's, Manchester?
Some good schools exist...but it is purely reliant on the supply of good teachers which may only constitute 20% of those that qualify.
"every single Chinese parent would rather their kid go the oxbridge route than any chinese school" - citation needed!
The oxbridge (as in "the bridge of the ox", a very logical outcome from "the ford of the ox" and "the bridge of the cam") are more of commercial enterprises than teaching institutions, and the preference for them are first and foremost the result of commercial advertising. The business model in here is to attract a great mass of pupils, be very selective about it (in order to have high-profile prospects), be very expensive (because the networking happening there must worth the hassle), then selling the achievements of these high-potenial strictly-preselected material to others as the results of its own merit. The research, the eccentric curriculum, or any other quirk that sets these institutions apart from others are just secondary. That is the naked truth.
While China has a great and deep culture, I don't see a strong reason why the UK should look to China for inspiration for its education system. The West continues to do great things in every field including technology. I think that the increasing representation of Chinese in technology is mainly due to the fact that hard technical skills are much more transferable across language and cultural barriers, than to any inherent advantage in China's education system. And while it's great that the Chinese government wants to invest more in cutting edge research, right now the most advances are still being made in the West.
Chinese education kills the real genius, but does make the ordinary kids a skillful engineer(relatively), so the best kids still want to go overseas while the rest can do math better than any other west countries after repeatedly practice.
The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage), however the demanding on the average kids are too little, many kids gave up or drop out and could not find a decent job thereafter. No-child-left-behind can only do so much. There is nearly no grit/hard-working attitude in middle/high schools here at USA comparing to China.
Note 1: Not all Chinese students going overseas are top kids these days anymore, in fact most of them are having a rich dad meanwhile they can not stand up the fierce competition in Chinese schools.
Note 2: The Chinese education system(in that sense, the India's) produced lot of "good-enough" engineers eager to fill up the H1B quota annually, those USA kids with the same IQ ended up not being a STEM engineer most likely, which is considered too nerdy or more, too hard for them. -- No pain, no gain.
I'll pull out one part of your comment to ask a question: you wrote,
The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage)
and I would like to ask, where does that happen? What place in the United States allows the top kids to fly freely? I ask, because I interact online most regularly with parents who have children identified as gifted children through regional Talent Search programs or specialized summer mathematics programs or the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.[1] I only very rarely hear of "top kids" (by any reasonable definition of top kids) whose parents report that the USA education system allows their children to fly freely. I just looked at your Hacker News user profile to see if you identify what country you are from. It is unusual enough here in the United States to say "USA education system" rather than "U.S. education system" or "United States education system" that I wonder whether you have ever experienced the education system here in the United States during your own education. On my part, I get the distinct impression that the United States education system underperforms for all learners in its care,[2] although not as badly as, say, Mexico's or India's.
So keep in mind this was a decade ago and I'm sure it's changed but when I was in highschool in Florida you could go Dual-Enrollment and the district would pay for any class and reimburse you for books. I went to college with my first three semesters of college finished. While that was particularly open handed many districts will at least pay tuition for what ever advanced classes you can test into as long as it fits the curriculum (X english classes, Y math classes...).
My local community college implies that sophmores and above (including home schoolers) can take any 1000 level or above class free (although the highschool gets veto power).
As someone who was identified as gifted and talented in Australia, I think the parents often want things that are not particularly useful, eg early university entry, or their goal is some special university program.
In high school I did training for the international mathematics Olympiads (which was too much work but otherwise a great program) and that was all the extra input I really needed. In university I did an ordinary math program, and my parents really didn't understand that the math department is more than capable of challenging high iq students.
I feel that the system let me "fligh freely" because I always had access to challenging material if I wanted it (I also did debating). However my parents weren't satisfied because they wanted to be provided with a clear path from my youthful intelligence to future success.
Yes I can confirm that US high schools (public ones at least) do not let their top kids fly freely. I have a high schooler who made USAJMO as an eighth grader (and later USAMO/MOSP as a ninth grader). The high school, which is a top area school, just did not care and insisted that he took Algebra II with the rest of the 9th graders. The school counselor might have been well meaning but was more likely just following the rules. At least the teacher had the wisdom to excuse him from homework after recognizing that he is the real deal, but the system is inflexible enough that he had to sit through the class instead of getting adjusted to one more appropriate for him. His friend who is a national winner of USAMO had to do the same thing in a different school, to the annoyance of the algebra teacher there (how do you even teach a USAMO winner in an Algebra II class?).
I believe when he said "fly freely", it compares to countries like India/China.
And you said the US system underperforms for all learner in its care.. Well you might have been right technically, in the way that exercising 30 minutes a day is not as good as say a bodybuilder's workout routine.
Personal experience here-> The High School I went to in China has this following schedule-
Weekday
6am wake up, 7am early self study/english pronunciation practice, 8~5 classes, 5~7 break time, 730~10 homework/ask teachers stuff, 1030 go to bed.
Saturday
Morning to noon, none stop exams to evaluate our progress. Go home in the afternoon.
Sunday
Return school before 7pm
Although this is my personal experience, almost all the competitive high schools in china follows similar schedule.
In comparison the US system grant much more freedom, I moved there at 10th grade and I must say it is much more liberating in choosing what I wanted to do. I do not think many schools in China let you pick the courses you want to study, or have as many (or any) college level courses. And for once starting your own club/participating in athletic activities is no longer "waste of time" and is recognized by college administration.
I am only comparing High schools because that's the only system I have expediences of on both sides.
I meant USA does not test each kid in school every month, sometimes weekly, to grade and measure their progress,to make sure they get great scores on STEM and all the related subjects, until they entered into college, that approach certainly can smother top kids' creativity and curiosity.
Less frequent milestone check-ups could give the top talent enough space to develop at their own pace "freely", mostly sponsored by their parents though(so really, not the public education system), I think that's what happens in US.
No place that has the perfect system to produce a strong engineering population while set the top kids free, but at a quantity level, China/India system will produce more IT workers and engineers(normalized), which is key to the future.
People go to overseas to have a better life, mostly. Being in developing world is not healthy. Competition makes you stronger, but pressure and having to worry about living is not healthy for a free mind. Education system cannot change those fundamental issues.
The top 20% of British kids do very well, academically and in the job market. The problem is the other 80% and I'm not sure it's the fault of the schooling system.
It made me kind of sad when the British students preferred copying things from a chalkboard. I tried to implement a flipped classroom -- 15 minutes of "lecture" at the beginning, 25 minutes of group practice, 15 minutes of individual practice, then a 5 minute formative assessment/quiz -- when I taught chemistry in a low-income public high school in Mississippi. My students were really disoriented at first and preferred the less mentally-active work of copying notes or listening to a teacher... I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material. Many complained that they'd rather get a packet of notes to transcribe during class time.
The good news: by my second year of teaching, kids from the first year were telling their friends how a flipped classroom takes work away from studying notes and puts them into your classroom time. My students were more confident when they practiced concepts in class then assessed their own knowledge with a low-pressure quiz at the end of class. My second year I had students (and their parents) fighting to be in my chemistry classroom instead of a 30-year veteran's traditional classroom with 55 minutes of lecture.
Based on what we know about learning and cognition -- and with the way that the internet and mobile technology is de-emphasizing the need for memorized fact and emphasizing asking questions and performing creative problem solving -- I don't know why we're looking towards rote learning models to educate a 21st century workforce.
Is it really normal for American high school teachers to lecture for the entire period? No exercises, just note-taking?
I hazard to guess that the British students prefer copying things from a chalkboard because it's a novelty and requires considerably less effort than doing exercises. If they did it on a regular basis they'd quickly get bored.
Depends on the class. History tends to have a lot of lectures. Science classes, math and English I don't recall as many (this was about 10 years ago). Also varies by teacher and I would assume school.
Math is probably the class that most easily follows this pattern: the teacher demonstrates how to solve a category of problem, the entire class practices it together with the teacher calling on students to provide answers, then after students are confidently solving the problem together they try to solve them independently -- a process that usually continues after class with homework problem sets.
Science classes in higher-income schools often follow this method too -- present a problem/question, introduce some bit of science knowledge, then investigate with a lab -- but low-income schools lack the resources to do lots of labs and as a result it's a lot of copying vocab/notes and doing problem sets that tend to be vocabulary-heavy.
Yeah, I think that sounds reasonable to me. I was thinking about my history classes more and there was a decent amount of interaction, just my memory about it was a bit fuzzy, since I haven't thought about the classes themselves in some years.
It had a decent amount of q/a and discussion, but it's rather hard to escape lectures in history. They didn't bother me though, since I had great history teachers that knew their stuff and made the lectures themselves interesting through anecdotes and personal experience. History was always my favorite subject, even though I obtained a degree in computer science.
It was when I was in High School. I used to alternate with a friend: one brings the notebook, one brings the pillow.
Pro Tip: Do not try the above in English class; many teachers will use subjectively graded assignments to punish you for sleeping through their lectures.
I taught English for 5 years in Japan (even though completely unqualified... cough... cough...). In my last year I did something very similar. The thing that got me to change was that I started tracking how much time I spent 1-1 with each of my students. If you are lecture focussed, you end up spending mere minutes a year actually interacting with an individual student. I remember setting myself a goal of spending 10 minutes with each student every term (still woefully insufficient!!!) and realizing that it was impossible unless I radically changed the class structure.
I actually moved the assessment/quiz to the beginning of the class as a "review", followed by 5 minutes of questions. This allowed students to gauge how they were doing cold "out of the gate". Often the students would realize that they were having a problem and we would expand this section before we moved on. In a survey that I made of the students, this was actually the most popular part of the class (which surprised me initially).
Next, I did 5 minutes of "lecture". Keeping it to 5 minutes was almost impossible, but I got better over time. Then I did "circling". This is a technique where you make grammar constructions more visible through questioning. For example, "John is a brown dog", "Who is a brown dog?", "What is John?", "What colour is John?", "What kind of animal is John?", "Is John a goldfish?". I do a random walk through the students and make sure that everyone understands the day's concept. (For some reason I can't find a good link with a description of circling. It is originally a technique from TPRS if anyone is interested to search for themselves).
Finally, there is group practice. Essentially I made the students solve logic puzzles in English (I disguised them as "games", but it boils down to this). They were allowed to use any resource they wanted to in order to answer the questions (including asking me, asking their friends, looking up things in dictionaries, etc). I did not enforce an "English only" policy because these were very low level students who had self esteem issues, but I had a sheet with everybody's name on it and every time I heard someone use English to ask/answer a question I would give them bonus marks. This was essentially their "classroom participation" mark.
Another successful idea for the group work at the beginning of the year was to have a series of difficult questions. The students then had to write down the name of somebody in the class who knew the answer to the question (The game was called "find someone who knows"). The idea was to integrate the higher level students and make them a valuable resource for the lower level students. Generally speaking, the high level students usually want to impress, so they do things like answer all the questions put to them in English. This worked surprisingly well (though probably partly due to peculiarities with Japanese social systems).
I only got to touch the surface of this before my contract ran out. I decided to go back to being a programmer rather than pursue a career of teaching, but it was an eye opening experience. I couldn't believe the difference it made to stop concentrating on presenting material and start concentrating on my students. So instead of explaining things, I simply watched them try to figure it out for themselves, giving them advice from time to time.
> I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material.
I don't know about your students but when I was in school copying things down was exactly how I engaged with the material. The act of transcription was how I remembered it -- I wouldn't even review the notes again later.
Would it help children achieve higher scores on standardized tests? I find it easy to believe it would. But does that actually help anyone?
Might some children prefer it over less regimented styles of education? I find it easy to believe that some would, because in the Chinese style, it's clear what they're supposed to be doing at any given moment, and clear what their goal is (to achieve high scores). But does this actually help anyone? The problem as I see it is that they are practicing in an unambiguous situation when life itself is inherently ambiguous.
A reader of this thread asked me off-forum to comment here. I've been reading the comments posted earlier in this thread, and just finished reading the fine article. I wonder how much background on the school and the teachers (both the British teachers and the Chinese teachers) the full television program provides. I felt that the article kindly submitted here teased with just a few details and didn't provide a lot of context. For example, when the article notes, "an experiment was carried out at the Bohunt School in Liphook," I immediately wonder what kind of school that is compared to other schools in Britain, especially when I see the headteacher of the British school say, "As the weeks passed, thanks both to the support of Bohunt's pastoral staff and a slight shift towards a teaching approach more recognisable to our pupils, behaviour improved." Most schools here in the United States, and I think most schools in Britain too, do not have a "pastoral staff," and maybe that school and its students are unrepresentative of students in general in the English-speaking world.
The point in the article that students have to be acculturated to what their school expects is very well taken. Students at a school-within-a-school for highly gifted students (a situation that exists in my local school district) have to be especially brought on board a school culture that differs from everyday school culture. And so it is for any school that introduces a change in curriculum, and for any school enrolling students who used to live elsewhere and attend other schools (a VERY common situation in the United States, and a situation I experienced while growing up).
Several comments here talk about "copying" or "regimentation," but the fine article points out that the Chinese teacher wanted to inductively lead students through a proof of the Pythagorean theorem--something I have done for much younger students here in the United States--while the British students insisted on just being told applications of the theorem without having to think about how the theorem is proved. A Minnesota Public Radio report just yesterday, based on a recent Aspen Ideas Festival discussion, "Is Math Important?"[1] includes statements that I think are factually incorrect about comparisons between education in the United States and education in China, but I have to agree with Professor Jo Boaler's statement that a mathematics lesson in secondary school in China is anything but memorization--it is all about students discovering mathematical ideas by pursuing a few hard problems each day with group discussion. There is a whole book about what Americans don't know about how elementary mathematics is taught in China[2] that is a good read for any participant here on Hacker News.
To answer the question posed by the article title, "Not without a lot of careful preparation, but it could possibly be an improvement for some students in some British schools."
I had an extremely unusual k-12 education - homeschooled in a very rigorous fashion the entire way. There was a very specific curricula, a hard start time, along with specific hours for specific tasks. My mother has a bachelor's degree and taught at an old-fashioned private school prior to my birth. Each specific hour was for a particular subject, with some % dedicated to lecture(ish), along with some % for seatwork. So even for homeschoolers, I was unusual in this discipline and educator's background.
So. I judge that my education's implementation was neither "Chinese" nor "American (British-ish?)" (I quote these words, because I don't know that they are adequately representative). However, I think that the conceptual precepts were much closer to the "Chinese" approach. Education and learning were expected. For instance, it would have been completely inappropriate and unacceptable for me to:
- complain about clothing (I did not have clothing requirements - if I had gone to a school with a uniform, so long as the clothing was functionally adequate for the weather, it would not have been acceptable to moan about fashion).
- complain about having no say in my education. In time, I got the chance to co-design my curriculum on the elective level, but not taking Math (as an example) would have been unacceptable and not up for discussion.
- Not doing assigned work. I was expected to complete the day's assignments. Interestingly, my school day finished at around 2pm (started at 8), with the rest of the day for assignments and my own time. The goal was understanding, not memorization (beyond the obvious facts that need remembering).
- complain about dullness. There was no conception that entertainment (i.e., fun) was part of the purpose of education. It was - in a hazy and unforced way - my duty and obligation to learn. Learning was the entire orientation; if it was dull, it was dull: sucking it up and moving on was the way to go.
A portion of how I was taught was entirely along the lines that the maths teacher (Mr. Zou) delineated:
> . When I first introduced Pythagoras's theorem, I decided to let the students find the proposition, prove and apply the theorem. That process is an important feature of maths teaching in China.
> But a lot of students said they found it unnecessary to prove Pythagoras's theorem - knowing how to apply it was enough.
Understanding the essence of the problem was a key component of the situation. Simply turning the math (or grammar, or history) crank and having an answer falling out was not considered to be a "good" way of going, and to perform at that level was to be only adequate. It was not the expected level - the expectation was to understand the material enough to build the equation. Learning in depth was normative, not unusual. This is very important to understand. I was not pulled out of school because I was gifted and talented. I was placed into homeschooling because my parents judged that the public schools of the area were inadequate to deliver an adequate education, which includes understanding the causes of the knowledge.
This expectation of in-depth understanding was then fed into the process of curriculum selection and analysis as I shifted into "high school" grades. As I prepared for college, my parents and I cooperated in building my coursework and knowledge base. In this I believe we sharply diverged from the "Chinese" model, as I was given broad freedom to learn on my own outside of the non-elective areas.
Fundamentally, education in my youth years was part of the appropriate process of growing up and becoming a fully formed adult. Not having a deep education was simply out of the question.
I think - given my experience - that the "Chinese" have a much better handle on how to educate. Let's dissect this -
> I'm used to speaking my mind in class, being bold, giving ideas, often working in groups to advance my s...
It looks like you were brought up with Western education and Chinese style discipline. I had much the same education as you, sans the discipline. And my father growing up had the discipline without the education.
So I find it a bit odd that you then say "I think - given my experience - that the "Chinese" have a much better handle on how to educate."
Going through point by point:
- complain about clothing
Discipline. Chinese.
- In time, I got the chance to co-design my curriculum on the elective level
Education. Western.
- Interestingly, my school day finished at around 2pm (started at 8)
Education. Western.
- The goal was understanding, not memorization
Education. Western.
- complain about dullness.
Discipline. Chinese.
> The basic question here is - are the student's ideas worth hearing ?
Actually, that is rather besides the point. Being able to discuss ideas, go out on a limb, work well in groups, etc are important skills. Providing feedback to the teacher is critical in a group setting. Even incorrect ideas put forward by a student can get the other students to really think about the topic.
I would say, rather, that I was brought up on principles that emphasized discipline, along with intellectual freedom and curiosity. The implementation of this emphasized discipline as I was a young child, then shifting towards freedom as I got old enough to have useful impact on curricula development. Neither of those precisely map to the US or the Chinese norms.
"it would have been completely inappropriate and unacceptable for me to" "complain about dullness" "Learning was the entire orientation; if it was dull, it was dull: sucking it up and moving on was the way to go."
The learning was the primary orientation in my education too, but apart from mental discipline training happening with "sucking up and moving on", I wonder - wouldn't have been best if the process have been more tailored to my capabilities as a child? It's like optimizing for the underlying platform, making it less wasteful (on energy consumed on concentration).
Looking back, I think we could have heavily optimized towards what is called today 'gifted and talented' in some areas of my education. That was kind of out of our world at that time. I particularly recall drills in math and recapitulating the same subject year after year (this was entirely the design of the curriculum - Saxon Math "Original"). It's important to note that I pursued other interests after schoolwork was done, and it was usually wrapped up by 3pm after 4th grade or so. This gave me, in effect, hours of self-teaching when I got interested in a subject (or hours of Legos, fooling around outside, and reading fiction). I self-taught DOS, QBASIC and C++, for instance. It was undirected, so not as fast and as thorough as a good curriculum, but it did serve. In general (maybe 90% of the time?), however, I liked school, outside of the part where it wasn't letting me play. My mother generally chose intellectually challenging curricula (one particularly notable example would be the US history course - 3 separate curricula combined into one, one each from conservative, centrist, and progressive viewpoints), upon which I found some meat to entertain my mind.
What I can attest to strongly is this: my k-12 teaching was far closer to college and the work world than anything I've ever read about from US public schools.
Your home schooling was already then, as I come to understand it, (at least in some regards) a very good implementation of optimized teaching. This lets me with the conclusion that some of the didactic material will just remain dull for someone regardless of the effort involved from the teacher's part.
I went to a public school in England (ie. fee-paying) and it wasn't too dissimilar from this. Hours were 9am-9pm for classes, two meals, afternoon sport and evening study. Copying everything from the whiteboard was standard for a lot of classes. The only major difference would be class sizes, which were kept to 10-15 per lesson instead of 50.
Maybe they're really just discovering the benefits of a bit of hard work and discipline.
Edit: I've also never really understood why British state schools let kids out at 2-3pm. Why not just keep them til 6pm when their parents get off work? It saves the parents huge trouble over childcare, whilst also having a demonstrably better effect on their education.
This is an extremely shallow work on education. All they know about Chinese-style education is "note-taking and repetition", "copy notes". Really? Do you really believe this is how Chinese students can be best at PISA assessment? Was PISA assessment designed based on Chinese students' notes?
Chinese/Asian students do work harder than western students, on average. But hard-working is not rote learning, nor does this mean rote learning is everything about "Chinese-style education". Equalizing Asian education to rote learning is a misconception has been denied by tons of studies. See examples:
It is over 40 years since I left school. The most striking thing about the programme is that that some of the children have learning difficulties. No, they're not ESN, but lack manners, so they eat / drink / chatter / giggle in class, and are astonished that this behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Tell them the rules, and if they unable to comply, exclude them so that they don't distract others (teachers and pupils).
Then discuss philosophy of 'I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand' etc.
40 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadEdit: I had trouble telling that each section was written by a different author.
Yes, there's a reason that the High Expectations Asian Father is a meme[1]. Even at home outside of school, the strict attitude of always being mindful of schooling was also made famous by the Tiger Mom author.[2]
When kids have 2 parents apply pressure like that, an inept high school football coach with a degree in General Studies could teach physics to Asian students and it wouldn't matter.
[1]http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Hymn-Tiger-Mother-Chua/dp/01431...
1 They cherry pick students. 2 The teachers in these specialised schools only teach one subject for only 3 hours day.
Perhaps this article should be more explicit in that it involves comparison between CHinese practices and those of a subset of British schools. I went to a british-style boys school, a rugby school. It was nothing like the one in this article. We did plenty of memorization. We paid attention and worked hard for many hours beyond what is expected of the kids in this article. By grade 12 I had actually read all the major Shakespeares, read them well enough to have opinions and write papers. (First year university was a total walk in comparison.) The brits need not go to china for inspiration.
The oxbridge (as in "the bridge of the ox", a very logical outcome from "the ford of the ox" and "the bridge of the cam") are more of commercial enterprises than teaching institutions, and the preference for them are first and foremost the result of commercial advertising. The business model in here is to attract a great mass of pupils, be very selective about it (in order to have high-profile prospects), be very expensive (because the networking happening there must worth the hassle), then selling the achievements of these high-potenial strictly-preselected material to others as the results of its own merit. The research, the eccentric curriculum, or any other quirk that sets these institutions apart from others are just secondary. That is the naked truth.
The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage), however the demanding on the average kids are too little, many kids gave up or drop out and could not find a decent job thereafter. No-child-left-behind can only do so much. There is nearly no grit/hard-working attitude in middle/high schools here at USA comparing to China.
Note 1: Not all Chinese students going overseas are top kids these days anymore, in fact most of them are having a rich dad meanwhile they can not stand up the fierce competition in Chinese schools. Note 2: The Chinese education system(in that sense, the India's) produced lot of "good-enough" engineers eager to fill up the H1B quota annually, those USA kids with the same IQ ended up not being a STEM engineer most likely, which is considered too nerdy or more, too hard for them. -- No pain, no gain.
The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage)
and I would like to ask, where does that happen? What place in the United States allows the top kids to fly freely? I ask, because I interact online most regularly with parents who have children identified as gifted children through regional Talent Search programs or specialized summer mathematics programs or the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.[1] I only very rarely hear of "top kids" (by any reasonable definition of top kids) whose parents report that the USA education system allows their children to fly freely. I just looked at your Hacker News user profile to see if you identify what country you are from. It is unusual enough here in the United States to say "USA education system" rather than "U.S. education system" or "United States education system" that I wonder whether you have ever experienced the education system here in the United States during your own education. On my part, I get the distinct impression that the United States education system underperforms for all learners in its care,[2] although not as badly as, say, Mexico's or India's.
[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/
[2] http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/international-results-...
http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/
My local community college implies that sophmores and above (including home schoolers) can take any 1000 level or above class free (although the highschool gets veto power).
http://www.cnm.edu/depts/outreach/dual-credit/dual-credit-th...
In high school I did training for the international mathematics Olympiads (which was too much work but otherwise a great program) and that was all the extra input I really needed. In university I did an ordinary math program, and my parents really didn't understand that the math department is more than capable of challenging high iq students.
I feel that the system let me "fligh freely" because I always had access to challenging material if I wanted it (I also did debating). However my parents weren't satisfied because they wanted to be provided with a clear path from my youthful intelligence to future success.
And you said the US system underperforms for all learner in its care.. Well you might have been right technically, in the way that exercising 30 minutes a day is not as good as say a bodybuilder's workout routine.
Personal experience here-> The High School I went to in China has this following schedule- Weekday 6am wake up, 7am early self study/english pronunciation practice, 8~5 classes, 5~7 break time, 730~10 homework/ask teachers stuff, 1030 go to bed. Saturday Morning to noon, none stop exams to evaluate our progress. Go home in the afternoon. Sunday Return school before 7pm
Although this is my personal experience, almost all the competitive high schools in china follows similar schedule.
In comparison the US system grant much more freedom, I moved there at 10th grade and I must say it is much more liberating in choosing what I wanted to do. I do not think many schools in China let you pick the courses you want to study, or have as many (or any) college level courses. And for once starting your own club/participating in athletic activities is no longer "waste of time" and is recognized by college administration.
I am only comparing High schools because that's the only system I have expediences of on both sides.
Less frequent milestone check-ups could give the top talent enough space to develop at their own pace "freely", mostly sponsored by their parents though(so really, not the public education system), I think that's what happens in US.
No place that has the perfect system to produce a strong engineering population while set the top kids free, but at a quantity level, China/India system will produce more IT workers and engineers(normalized), which is key to the future.
The good news: by my second year of teaching, kids from the first year were telling their friends how a flipped classroom takes work away from studying notes and puts them into your classroom time. My students were more confident when they practiced concepts in class then assessed their own knowledge with a low-pressure quiz at the end of class. My second year I had students (and their parents) fighting to be in my chemistry classroom instead of a 30-year veteran's traditional classroom with 55 minutes of lecture.
Based on what we know about learning and cognition -- and with the way that the internet and mobile technology is de-emphasizing the need for memorized fact and emphasizing asking questions and performing creative problem solving -- I don't know why we're looking towards rote learning models to educate a 21st century workforce.
I hazard to guess that the British students prefer copying things from a chalkboard because it's a novelty and requires considerably less effort than doing exercises. If they did it on a regular basis they'd quickly get bored.
Science classes in higher-income schools often follow this method too -- present a problem/question, introduce some bit of science knowledge, then investigate with a lab -- but low-income schools lack the resources to do lots of labs and as a result it's a lot of copying vocab/notes and doing problem sets that tend to be vocabulary-heavy.
It had a decent amount of q/a and discussion, but it's rather hard to escape lectures in history. They didn't bother me though, since I had great history teachers that knew their stuff and made the lectures themselves interesting through anecdotes and personal experience. History was always my favorite subject, even though I obtained a degree in computer science.
Pro Tip: Do not try the above in English class; many teachers will use subjectively graded assignments to punish you for sleeping through their lectures.
I actually moved the assessment/quiz to the beginning of the class as a "review", followed by 5 minutes of questions. This allowed students to gauge how they were doing cold "out of the gate". Often the students would realize that they were having a problem and we would expand this section before we moved on. In a survey that I made of the students, this was actually the most popular part of the class (which surprised me initially).
Next, I did 5 minutes of "lecture". Keeping it to 5 minutes was almost impossible, but I got better over time. Then I did "circling". This is a technique where you make grammar constructions more visible through questioning. For example, "John is a brown dog", "Who is a brown dog?", "What is John?", "What colour is John?", "What kind of animal is John?", "Is John a goldfish?". I do a random walk through the students and make sure that everyone understands the day's concept. (For some reason I can't find a good link with a description of circling. It is originally a technique from TPRS if anyone is interested to search for themselves).
Finally, there is group practice. Essentially I made the students solve logic puzzles in English (I disguised them as "games", but it boils down to this). They were allowed to use any resource they wanted to in order to answer the questions (including asking me, asking their friends, looking up things in dictionaries, etc). I did not enforce an "English only" policy because these were very low level students who had self esteem issues, but I had a sheet with everybody's name on it and every time I heard someone use English to ask/answer a question I would give them bonus marks. This was essentially their "classroom participation" mark.
Another successful idea for the group work at the beginning of the year was to have a series of difficult questions. The students then had to write down the name of somebody in the class who knew the answer to the question (The game was called "find someone who knows"). The idea was to integrate the higher level students and make them a valuable resource for the lower level students. Generally speaking, the high level students usually want to impress, so they do things like answer all the questions put to them in English. This worked surprisingly well (though probably partly due to peculiarities with Japanese social systems).
I only got to touch the surface of this before my contract ran out. I decided to go back to being a programmer rather than pursue a career of teaching, but it was an eye opening experience. I couldn't believe the difference it made to stop concentrating on presenting material and start concentrating on my students. So instead of explaining things, I simply watched them try to figure it out for themselves, giving them advice from time to time.
I don't know about your students but when I was in school copying things down was exactly how I engaged with the material. The act of transcription was how I remembered it -- I wouldn't even review the notes again later.
Might some children prefer it over less regimented styles of education? I find it easy to believe that some would, because in the Chinese style, it's clear what they're supposed to be doing at any given moment, and clear what their goal is (to achieve high scores). But does this actually help anyone? The problem as I see it is that they are practicing in an unambiguous situation when life itself is inherently ambiguous.
The point in the article that students have to be acculturated to what their school expects is very well taken. Students at a school-within-a-school for highly gifted students (a situation that exists in my local school district) have to be especially brought on board a school culture that differs from everyday school culture. And so it is for any school that introduces a change in curriculum, and for any school enrolling students who used to live elsewhere and attend other schools (a VERY common situation in the United States, and a situation I experienced while growing up).
Several comments here talk about "copying" or "regimentation," but the fine article points out that the Chinese teacher wanted to inductively lead students through a proof of the Pythagorean theorem--something I have done for much younger students here in the United States--while the British students insisted on just being told applications of the theorem without having to think about how the theorem is proved. A Minnesota Public Radio report just yesterday, based on a recent Aspen Ideas Festival discussion, "Is Math Important?"[1] includes statements that I think are factually incorrect about comparisons between education in the United States and education in China, but I have to agree with Professor Jo Boaler's statement that a mathematics lesson in secondary school in China is anything but memorization--it is all about students discovering mathematical ideas by pursuing a few hard problems each day with group discussion. There is a whole book about what Americans don't know about how elementary mathematics is taught in China[2] that is a good read for any participant here on Hacker News.
To answer the question posed by the article title, "Not without a lot of careful preparation, but it could possibly be an improvement for some students in some British schools."
[1] http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/08/03/mpr_news_presents
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf
The American schools I've seen did have such staff, but they called them guidance counselors or something like that.
So. I judge that my education's implementation was neither "Chinese" nor "American (British-ish?)" (I quote these words, because I don't know that they are adequately representative). However, I think that the conceptual precepts were much closer to the "Chinese" approach. Education and learning were expected. For instance, it would have been completely inappropriate and unacceptable for me to:
- complain about clothing (I did not have clothing requirements - if I had gone to a school with a uniform, so long as the clothing was functionally adequate for the weather, it would not have been acceptable to moan about fashion).
- complain about having no say in my education. In time, I got the chance to co-design my curriculum on the elective level, but not taking Math (as an example) would have been unacceptable and not up for discussion.
- Not doing assigned work. I was expected to complete the day's assignments. Interestingly, my school day finished at around 2pm (started at 8), with the rest of the day for assignments and my own time. The goal was understanding, not memorization (beyond the obvious facts that need remembering).
- complain about dullness. There was no conception that entertainment (i.e., fun) was part of the purpose of education. It was - in a hazy and unforced way - my duty and obligation to learn. Learning was the entire orientation; if it was dull, it was dull: sucking it up and moving on was the way to go.
A portion of how I was taught was entirely along the lines that the maths teacher (Mr. Zou) delineated:
> . When I first introduced Pythagoras's theorem, I decided to let the students find the proposition, prove and apply the theorem. That process is an important feature of maths teaching in China.
> But a lot of students said they found it unnecessary to prove Pythagoras's theorem - knowing how to apply it was enough.
Understanding the essence of the problem was a key component of the situation. Simply turning the math (or grammar, or history) crank and having an answer falling out was not considered to be a "good" way of going, and to perform at that level was to be only adequate. It was not the expected level - the expectation was to understand the material enough to build the equation. Learning in depth was normative, not unusual. This is very important to understand. I was not pulled out of school because I was gifted and talented. I was placed into homeschooling because my parents judged that the public schools of the area were inadequate to deliver an adequate education, which includes understanding the causes of the knowledge.
This expectation of in-depth understanding was then fed into the process of curriculum selection and analysis as I shifted into "high school" grades. As I prepared for college, my parents and I cooperated in building my coursework and knowledge base. In this I believe we sharply diverged from the "Chinese" model, as I was given broad freedom to learn on my own outside of the non-elective areas.
Fundamentally, education in my youth years was part of the appropriate process of growing up and becoming a fully formed adult. Not having a deep education was simply out of the question.
I think - given my experience - that the "Chinese" have a much better handle on how to educate. Let's dissect this -
> I'm used to speaking my mind in class, being bold, giving ideas, often working in groups to advance my s...
So I find it a bit odd that you then say "I think - given my experience - that the "Chinese" have a much better handle on how to educate."
Going through point by point:
- complain about clothing
Discipline. Chinese.
- In time, I got the chance to co-design my curriculum on the elective level
Education. Western.
- Interestingly, my school day finished at around 2pm (started at 8)
Education. Western.
- The goal was understanding, not memorization
Education. Western.
- complain about dullness.
Discipline. Chinese.
> The basic question here is - are the student's ideas worth hearing ?
Actually, that is rather besides the point. Being able to discuss ideas, go out on a limb, work well in groups, etc are important skills. Providing feedback to the teacher is critical in a group setting. Even incorrect ideas put forward by a student can get the other students to really think about the topic.
The learning was the primary orientation in my education too, but apart from mental discipline training happening with "sucking up and moving on", I wonder - wouldn't have been best if the process have been more tailored to my capabilities as a child? It's like optimizing for the underlying platform, making it less wasteful (on energy consumed on concentration).
What I can attest to strongly is this: my k-12 teaching was far closer to college and the work world than anything I've ever read about from US public schools.
Maybe they're really just discovering the benefits of a bit of hard work and discipline.
Edit: I've also never really understood why British state schools let kids out at 2-3pm. Why not just keep them til 6pm when their parents get off work? It saves the parents huge trouble over childcare, whilst also having a demonstrably better effect on their education.
Chinese/Asian students do work harder than western students, on average. But hard-working is not rote learning, nor does this mean rote learning is everything about "Chinese-style education". Equalizing Asian education to rote learning is a misconception has been denied by tons of studies. See examples:
- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1004036826490
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X84....
Just search "rote learning asian" in google scholar, you will see.
The "experiment" / report superficially based on this stereotype won't produce much meaningful results.
Then discuss philosophy of 'I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand' etc.