Abstract
Shanghai teachers constantly and systematically improve their teaching through teacher mentoring and collaboration.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Wu (2010b), teacher-research groups and lesson preparation groups were first introduced through a 1957 document issued by the Ministry of Education. Known as ‘Work regulation (draft) on research group for secondary teaching’ [guanyu zhongxue jiaoxue yanjiuzu gongzuo tiaoli (caoan)], the document states that teachers should be organised into teaching-research groups. The regulation also provides details on the organising of teaching-research work, organisational leadership, etc. For example, the document states that 3 or more teachers will form a subject teaching-research group. If there are an insufficient number of teachers for one subject, the group can be formed by teachers who teach similar subjects.
- 2.
Tian (2002), in her research of 3 schools in Shanghai, notes that some novice teachers feel uncomfortable leading, challenging or criticising their senior colleagues. She concludes that distributed Âleadership bears the ‘Chinese characteristics’ of staff cooperation that is underpinned by the Confucian values of reciprocity and seniority (p. 28). Wang 2002) also avers that teacher mentoring may prevent the novice teachers from learning to question the existing assumptions of knowledge and teaching (p. 367). The challenges mentioned by Tian and Wang remind us that cultural scripts bring with them not just positive effects but tensions, issues and problems too.
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Wang (2002) asserts that teachers in China have developed a more sophisticated understanding and more flexible representations of school mathematics than their US counterparts because of their ‘intensive study of mandated curriculum’ and greater amounts of time spent planning lessons together with their peers, as well as ‘observing and reflecting on each other’s methods of instruction’ (p. 344). Of course, the actual effectiveness of the teaching-research group, teacher mentoring and lesson observation varies from school to school. Some Shanghai educators have pointed out to me instances where the teaching-research group activities are formalistic and superficial, where teacher mentoring is unsatisfactory for the mentee as the mentor is unwilling to impart his or her knowledge for fear of being overtaken by a young upstart, and where lesson observations are largely reduced to performances and showmanship. But the point here is that the structural provision for teacher collaboration and teacher mentoring in Shanghai/China provides a potentially conducive and efficacious means for teacher growth.
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Tan, C. (2013). Kung Fu Panda: Teacher Mentoring and Collaboration. In: Learning from Shanghai. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 21. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4021-87-6_17
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