{"id":2146,"date":"2015-10-24T11:01:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T11:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/?p=2146"},"modified":"2024-10-12T14:09:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-12T14:09:06","slug":"what-can-we-learn-from-shanghai-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/what-can-we-learn-from-shanghai-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"We can learn about maths teaching from Shanghai"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- This is in response to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/srcav\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">@srcav<\/a>'s question in his post <a href=\"https:\/\/cavmaths.wordpress.com\/2015\/10\/18\/can-or-should-we-learn-from-china\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">'Can, or should, we learn from China?'<\/a>.\n\nIt comes as no surprise that I take issue with his article but I\u2019ll start by saying I like Stephen. His contributions on his blog are more prolific and thoughtful than mine. I\u2019ve told him directly that I admire him and my rebuttal of the points in his post in no way take away from what I know him to be \u2013 a kind, hardworking, brilliant maths teacher.\nI'll start with where we agree and some uncontestable truths:\n\n\n<ol>\n\t\n\n<li>The Chinese ambassador was on the Marr Show.<\/li>\n\n\n\t\n\n<li>In some aspects China doesn't have a great human rights (but that's not the whole story)<\/li>\n\n\n\t\n\n<li>Stephen has indeed heard Vanessa Pittard talk about Shanghai.<\/li>\n\n\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\nI'll now begin my grievances.\n\nStephen states \"We are shipping teachers in and sending ours over there to see what we can learn.\"\nAside from the unnecessary use of emotive language designed to lead the reader to thinking teachers coming over is a bad thing , it's a fair statement overall. Rather than exploring the possibilities of what we could learn however, Stephen asks, \"So why is there no outrage over this?\" [Again, unnecessary use of 'outrage' but the intention seems to be to elicit a sense of \"indignancy\" that we should be \"shipping\" teachers to our shores.]\n\nI'll answer Stephen's question. We shouldn't be outraged because China's human rights abuses bear no relation whatsoever on the teaching of maths in Shanghai. The biggest disconnect in Stephen's thinking is right here: he seems to be suggesting we, as an education community in England, shun the learning opportunities because of historical and current human rights abuses. For one, I don't know diddly about human rights issues in China but I do know that we should be focusing on Shanghai pedagogy and its transferability. Second, if we're going to start playing the \"we shouldn't be learning from ________ [insert country of choice] because they have a bad human rights record\" card, then where do we stop? Do we ban German cars on our roads because of Hitler? Do we stop visiting Cambodia because of Pol Pot? Do we stop learning anything from the Old Testament because of the Midianite destruction in Book of Numbers?\n\nNo of course not, \n\n--><br \/>\nMy interest in Shanghai maths teaching is an intellectual matter not a political one.<\/p>\n<p><!--\nHe then asks the first of three rhetorical questions in the article, \"Isn\u2019t that an area where we want to ensure human rights are protected?\" Erm. I think we want to protect human rights EVERYwhere. Of course we want human rights protected.\n\nAs if to strengthen his argument, Stephen uses his mate's flippant comment about what you can do when people are under fear of death. Of course, people will do a lot when they fear death but it's a big stretch to equate the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to fear of death and, in the next paragraph, to discipline in schools!\n\nMy disappointment plunged deepest when I read the penultimate paragraph.\n\n\"This fear of the establishment is wide ranging and must be instilled from a young age\" Totally unqualified and hugely unfair on Chinese people in general, particularly educators in Shanghai.\n\"No need to try increase engagement and buy in, no need for teachers to be motivators.\" *Even* in China, teachers need to increase engagement and buy-in. Of course teachers need to be motivators.\n\nStephen is correct, however, that low-level distraction is not prevalent in the high-performing schools. But then I don't understand the argument that we can\u2019t learn from them. The result of not having to expend energy tackling pupil behaviour is that they spend time iterating and improving their pedagogy in a classroom environment that allows it. They\u2019ve been able to refine and refine and refine their questions and their understanding of pupils\u2019 misconceptions. \n\n--><br \/>\nWe should definitely be wanting to know more about their pedagogy given we are rarely in a position in our busy, chaotic, highly emotional school lives to engage with it. They\u2019re the ones who have the chance to rigorously pull apart and reconstruct maths teaching.<\/p>\n<p><!--\n\nThere are some other things worth shedding light on.\n\nShanghai is not China. What we can learn from China is not the same as what we can learn from Shanghai. Looking at China\u2019s human rights record tells us nothing about teaching in Shanghai any more than our involvement in Iraq tells us about humanities teaching in Grimsby (which, no doubt is very good, by the way).\nChina is not on the PISA rankings. Shanghai is. Do you know why Shanghai is on the PISA rankings? I do \u2013 while we were in Shanghai we had a lecture from the very guy who made the decision to enter the city in PISA. He told us that prior to 2009, the OECD hadn\u2019t invited to China to take part in PISA because it wasn\u2019t for developing countries \u2013 a sort of Educational Rich Members Club. That seems quite closed-minded of OECD but no doubt there are other justifications that I\u2019m not aware of.\n\nAlthough China as a whole didn\u2019t and still doesn\u2019t enter PISA, Shanghai, to their credit, put themselves forward for it for several reasons:\n\n\n<ol>\n\t\n\n<li>They wanted to benchmark themselves<\/li>\n\n\n\t\n\n<li>They wanted to improve and wanted some pointers for their 2010-2020 education plan, which they were in the middle of writing<\/li>\n\n\n\t\n\n<li>They wanted to learn about assessment best practice [whether PISA represents best practice isn\u2019t the point, they wanted to learn from a suite of assessments being used on a global scale]<\/li>\n\n\n<\/ol>\n\n\n--><br \/>\nThe fact that they come out on top consistently is of interest to me. If I was a manager of a mid-tier football team, I\u2019d be wanting to find out what the managers of the top teams were doing. If I was a trainee surgeon, I\u2019d want to know what the best surgeons do. If I was a maths teacher, I\u2019d want to know what the best maths teaching might look like (and PISA would give me an indication as to where to look).<\/p>\n<p>Shanghai is humble enough to claim they don\u2019t have the monopoly on good ideas and I\u2019ve been more than happy to find out how they do what they do. <\/p>\n<p><!--\nKnowing that they\u2019re coming over to spend a month with us, I would definitely be waiting to see them before I started casting doubt on what\u2019s transferable.\n--><\/p>\n<p>As 60 Shanghai teachers prepare to teach in our schools next month, I am excited about what we&#8217;ll see that&#8217;s transerable.<\/p>\n<p><!--\nLastly, let\u2019s talk about the teachers who are coming over. Did you know they had to apply to come here? Did you know they are keen to learn from us? Did you know some are leaving young families behind? Have you thought about what a daunting prospect it is for them?\nSuppose British teachers had applied to go to the far side of the world to teach in a foreign classroom for 3 weeks. Suppose British teachers were leaving their classes and their own children for a month. Suppose a Chinese blogger were to write about the utility of our impending visit because of our involvement in two World Wars. Or because a mate made a flippant remark about our culture.\n\nWould we tolerate the reverse scenario?\n\nIn closing, Stephen has missed the mark in this post by falsely painting Shanghai with China\u2019s brush, asking rhetorical questions, missing the point of what there is to learn, making it political, making crude judgments about use of fear in the classroom, and all right before our hard-working, humble and well-meaning colleagues from Shanghai give up a month to share and be shared with.\n\n--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My interest in Shanghai maths teaching is an intellectual matter not a political one. We should definitely be wanting to know more about their pedagogy given we are rarely in a position in our busy, chaotic, highly emotional school lives&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-pedagogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2146"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2305,"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions\/2305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}