China Teaching Day One
The day started off with a large group presentation. The students were welcomed and provided with an overview of the program. This was all done in Chinese. Thus, I’m not sure exactly what was said, but I did spend time reading the body language of the teachers. I would propose that if you recorded just about any opening of Professional Development, and turned off the sound, they would all look the same. The vast majority of teachers were paying attention and focused on the presentation. A few of the teachers appeared to be off task (I use appeared very deliberately). There was plenty of laughter and body language indicated that the teachers were engaged.
Due to the number of rooms available and the number of teachers, most of us are now paired up to teach. I’m paired with the wonderful Mr. Shawn McGirr. Shawn has been in China for the previous session as well as this one. This is a big advantage as he has the structure for working with the Chinese teachers. However, unsurprisingly, these teachers are very different than the previous teachers.
We started out with an ice breaker activity. We had the teachers line up in alphabetical order based their English name. They needed to accomplish this without talking. We had them complete the task again using their birthday, then by using the last four numbers of their ID. They are a good group who completed the tasks well. They processed the idea of different ways of communicating well. They also observed the different roles that participants take on.
We talked about the professional role of teachers as well. Their schedule is very different than the schedule that Americans traditional teach. For example, they teach two classes a day. However, they have lots of other meetings and duties to which to attend. The students have about seven classes a day. Also, the students stay in the same room. The teachers rotate rooms to go to the students.
We had the teachers work on an Insight Inventory. Here they identified their own learning styles. Once they had done so, they also imagined a student and identified the characteristics of that student on the Insight Inventory. They shared their story with each other.
We had the teachers complete a KWL activity revolving around their learning throughout the day. This was their Exit slip for the day.
At several points today, we had the teachers work on Table Talk. This was a new concept for most of them. We had them talk to the person across from them, talk to the person on their right, etc.
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